Criticism > Short Story Criticism > A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - Hans-Joachim Kann (essay date 1977)

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - Hans-Joachim Kann (essay date 1977)

Hans-Joachim Kann (essay date 1977)

SOURCE: “Perpetual Confusion in ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’: The Manuscript Evidence,” in Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1977, pp. 115-18.

[In the following essay, Kann examines Hemingway's original manuscript and concludes that it was the author who inserted an uncharacteristic line of dialogue for the older waiter.]

Ever since the appearance of the first articles by F. P. Kroeger and William E. Colburn in 1959,1 it has been clear that, apart from the apparent ambiguity in the first dialogue, the third dialogue section of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is obscure (or even messy) at the end. Numerous attempts have been made2 to explain the contradiction and to restore order in the two waiters' dialogue. Otto Reinert wanted to have two indented and quotation-marked lines read as one line of dialogue; Joseph F. Gabriel saw the confusion as an intended literary device; John...

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