What is an example of parallelism in the short story "In Another Country"?

Parallelism is a special feature of sentence structure in which multiple strings of words within the same sentence match each other in terms of word order. (That is, sections within a sentence are nearly identical and so they lie gracefully next to each other, like parallel lines.) The result is often a sentence that pleases the ear: one whose repetition, balance, rhythm, and/or flow makes the sentence memorable.

Hemingway is actually known for writing in a compressed, efficient way with no wasted words, so it's not surprising that we'd find parallelism in his stories. Let's check out some examples from "In Another Country":

1. "We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the town through the dusk to the hospital."

Notice how the three prepositional phrases are parallel to each other in the sentence above, creating a plodding rhythm appropriate for a description of that long walk to the hospital: "across the town," "through the dusk," "to the hospital." In each element of this instance of parallelism, we have "preposition + 'the' + noun." Hemingway adds extra emphasis to these parallel elements by leaving out any intervening commas, which creates the sense that the ideas are stacked tightly on top of each other.

2. "They were all three from Milan, and one of them was to be a lawyer, and one was to be a painter, and one had intended to be a soldier, and after we were finished with the machines, sometimes we walked back together to the Café Cova, which was next door to the Scala."

Here, again we see three elements that repeat in the pattern "'and one' + verb + 'to be' + 'a' + noun." The effect is that the story sounds for a moment like a fairy tale, one that lists each character in a solemn, repeated manner that lends weight and emphasis to their introduction. Notice here that Hemingway did decide to include commas so that we'd pause for a quick consideration of each person being introduced.

Overall, you can get a greater sense of the effectiveness of these examples, or any other examples of parallelism, by seeing what happens when you mess with the parallelism. That is, express the same idea in different words, and notice how much the rhythm and repetition really adds to the idea. In these rephrased versions, listen to how the style of the original sentences is gone: "There were different ways of walking to the hospital, at dusk, but you had to cross town regardless" or "The three men from Milan were going to be a lawyer, painter, and soldier."