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Posing a question is also a common use for fragments, and they can also be used
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to express doubt, surprise, shock, and outrage, or to speak directly to the reader in
an appeal to the audience. Similarly, one character may address another with this
same rhetorical purpose as in this example from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story
“Fatherland” (p. 000). Phuong has just discovered that her sister, Vivien, has not been
working as a doctor in America, as Phuong had been led to believe, and she is trying
to grasp what Vivien is telling her:

Redefining America
“Where’s all the money coming from?” Phuong could not tabulate how much her sister
had spent, but she knew it was in the thousands of dollars. Just the gift envelopes alone
that Vivien had distributed on her first night in Saigon held six hundred-dollar bills for
Mr. and Mrs. Ly, two of the same for Phuong, and one each for her brothers. “All the
dinners and tickets? The trips to Da Lat and Vung Tau?”

Both fragments function demonstrate Phuong’s disbelief, and neither has a subject nor
a complete verb, nor an object. If we added a subject and complete verb and direct
object to make it a complete sentence, it might read like this:

How did you buy all of the dinners and tickets? How did you buy the trips to Da Lat
and Vung Tau?

In the following example, Barack Obama begins and concludes a paragraph with
fragments that provoke the reader to consider the implications of how the previous
paragraph relates to the this. The first sentence below concludes one paragraph, and
the next sentence begins the explanation of what this other “ingredient in the American
saga” is. The final fragment of the full paragraph echoes the others (p. 000):
For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American
saga.

A belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the south side of
Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior
citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between
medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If
there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due
process, that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s
keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper — that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to
pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family.
“E pluribus unum.” Out of many, one.
Lest you think that fragments are more common to contemporary than classic
writing, consider this example from Thoreau, written in 1854:

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want
next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and
more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous incessant
and hotter fires, and the like.
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