Criticism > Short Story Criticism > A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - John V. Hagopian (essay date 1964)

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - John V. Hagopian (essay date 1964)

John V. Hagopian (essay date 1964)

SOURCE: “Tidying Up Hemingway's Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. I, No. 2, Winter, 1964, pp. 140-46.

[In the following essay, Hagopian rejects earlier attempts to attribute Hemingway's dialogue in the story—particularly Joseph Gabriel's above—and considers the flaw in the dialogue as an obvious typographical error.]

Interpretation of Hemingway's “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” has always been dogged by the problem of the confused dialogue between the two waiters, and it seems to me unfortunate that the discussion of it remains where Joseph F. Gabriel left it in College English (May, 1961). Gabriel was responding to three earlier articles in the same journal (February and May, 1959), in the first of which F. P. Kroeger had accurately interpreted most of the dialogue up to the line “I know. You said she cut him down,” which he assumed to be incorrectly...

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