Criticism > Short Story Criticism > A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - David Lodge (essay date 1971)

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - David Lodge (essay date 1971)

David Lodge (essay date 1971)

SOURCE: “Hemingway's Clean, Well-Lighted, Puzzling Place,” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. XXI, No. 1, January, 1971, pp. 33-57.

[In the following essay, Lodge contrasts the older and younger waiters in the story and concludes that Hemingway “deliberately encourages the reader to make an initially incorrect discrimination between the two waiters which, when discovered and corrected, amounts to a kind of peripetia.”]

‘A Clean Well-Lighted Place’ is one of Ernest Hemingway's best-known and most often reprinted short stories; yet until very recently its text contained a curious anomaly: curious, especially, in that it for so long apparently escaped the attention both of Hemingway himself and of his readers. For this crux is not a minor, incidental matter, but one that vitally affects one's reading of the whole story. In fact, the text which appeared in Scribner's Magazine in March 1933, and was...

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