Criticism > Short Story Criticism > A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - David Kerner (essay date 1979)

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - David Kerner (essay date 1979)

David Kerner (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: “The Foundation of the True Text of ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’” in Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1979, pp. 279-300.

[In the following essay, Kerner determines the possible sources for Hemingway's confusing and unconventional use of dialogue and urges a restoration of the author's original text.]

It is almost sixty years since Hemingway silently patented a small change in the way we arrange dialogue; but many readers still refuse to acknowledge the innovation, so that we have had, over the past twenty years, not only twenty conflicting articles on the dialogue of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” but even the publisher's unwarranted emendation of the text. Like the justice of the peace at the end of Faulkner's “Spotted Horses,” we want to cry, “I can't stand no more! This court's adjourned! Adjourned!” The latest misleading testimony, from both sides of the North Atlantic, is that...

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