I Will Fight No More Forever

Chief Joseph uses sentences composed of identical grammatical constructions to create auditory balance for the listener and to distribute weight equally among ideas he feels carry similar importance. In oration, this type of repetition of grammatical structures helps keep major ideas and details separate while stringing them together into a logical and memorable pattern. An example is this passage: “Looking Glass is dead, Ta-hool-hool-shute is dead. The old men all are dead” (Line 3). Each idea is of equal importance to Chief Joseph and each idea is conveyed through a simple noun or noun phrase followed by a form of the verb “to be” and the predicate “dead.” Each contains a separate piece of information. Joined together by the parallelism of each structure, the separate parts add up to a greater whole, not simply an accounting of the dead but a deeper message relating to the loss of wisdom and guidance that each of these separate deaths signals.

Repetition is a common rhetorical device in oral traditions and speech writing. It serves as a mnemonic device for the listener (who cannot go back and reread) to help remember important details.