Polysyndeton
Figures of speechMultiplying coordinating conjunctions, stretching the sentence into an ample or obsessive breath.
Example
"And the evening came, and the road climbed, and nobody spoke."
Polysyndeton repeats the conjunction before each coordinated element where usage would put only one: "and the rain, and the wind, and the falling night." The sentence advances in regular waves; each "and" relaunches the breath instead of closing it.
It can produce biblical amplitude, the exhaustion of an endless enumeration, or the childlike insistence of a piling voice. Hemingway made it a signature: his strings of "and" give the prose the regularity of a march. Like its inverse, asyndeton, it works through deviation from the norm — it is above all a figure of rhythm.
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