These look like fragments. Help me to understand why they are okay to use

Question

“How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure. ”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

I recently found out that when writing lists, items in a list don't have to be complete sentences, like "You might write to: Inform".

After this writer utilizes a question mark, it seems to get written, "With difficulty". That's not a sentence. Maybe I don't get how sentences utilize a subject, a verb, and an object. Some writers don't seem to utilize this. I don't think I understand. When can I write a complete sentence or not, when some writers seem to write things like this?

Is he writing with respect to what he formerly wrote? May these things get specified as fragments? May writers utilize fragments? Why are fragments sometimes utilized, sometimes not?

Answer 1

There's no rule that utterances have to be complete sentences. What they have to do is communicate.

Alice: How did you escape?
Bob: I escaped with difficulty.

Bob doesn't need to say I escaped here. Alice already knows she's asking about how Bob escaped. It's obvious from context.

But what about this conversation?

Alice: Hello!
Bob: ^#With difficulty.

Now Bob isn't making any sense. If Bob wanted to say that he escaped with difficulty, he'd have to use a complete sentence:

Alice: Hello!
Bob: I escaped with difficulty.

He has to use a complete sentence because there's no context to allow the fragment as an answer. The fragment doesn't make sense here; Alice needs to know what Bob did with difficulty.

In your example, the author is engaging in hypophora – asking and answering his own questions:

How did I escape?
I escaped with difficulty.
How did I plan this moment?
I planned this moment with pleasure.

It doesn't matter that it's in a list. It'd be fine with just one question and answer. The repetition is pleasing to the ear, though.

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In this answer, the ^# symbol means "This utterance doesn't make sense in this context."

Answer 2

This is conventionally called ellipsis, the supposed "omission" of words which are not necessary to understand the semantic and syntactic meaning of an utterance.

I put omission in quotation marks because nothing is in fact omitted unless you hold to the theory that only utterances which constitute a full sentence are acceptable, coherent, and meaningful. That this theory is in fact wrong is evident in virtually every actual conversation. For instance:

Going to Bryan's?
Nope. Homework.

This can be expanded by inference to two formally complete sentences:

Are you going to Bryan's home? No, I have homework I must do.

But that is a paraphrase. In fact, the two participants in that exchange know exactly what is meant, and have said everything that needed to be said, omitting nothing.

In the same way, the two questions posed in your example do not require a response framed as two complete sentences. Ignoring the device of having both the question and answer spoken by the same speaker: The interrogative how directs the hearer's attention to the speaker's lack of a particular datum, an adverbial, and the hearer replies by supplying what is wanted; he is not required to tell the questioner what the questioner already knows:

I escaped with difficulty. I planned this moment with pleasure.

Answer 3

Fragments bad?

Why no.

Fragments good?

Sometimes.

When fragments good?

Emphasis. Sense of speed. Rhetorical impact. Sense of action. Rapid response.

When fragments bad?

Too much. Not enough detail. Too many. Tired reader.

I'd add also that the most common cause of people revising both fragments and misdiagnosed fragments—both when they needed such revision and when they were better to begin with—is probably when the grammar checker on Word complains "Fragment. Consider revising", which is itself an example of sentence fragments.