Criticism > Short Story Criticism > A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - Joseph F. Gabriel (essay date 1961)

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - Joseph F. Gabriel (essay date 1961)

Joseph F. Gabriel (essay date 1961)

SOURCE: “The Logic of Confusion in Hemingway's ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’” in College English, Vol. 22, No. 8, May, 1961, pp. 539-46.

[In the following essay, Gabriel revisits the confusion regarding the dialogue in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and contends that “there is no error made in the dialogue … in short, the inconsistency in the dialogue is deliberate, an integral part of the pattern of meaning actualized in the story.”]

Recent criticism of Hemingway's much admired and frequently anthologized “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” has attempted to demonstrate that this story contains a damaging flaw. Indeed, two critics, F. P. Kroeger (“The Dialogue in ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’” College English, Feb. 1959) and William E. Colburn (“Confusion in ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’” College English, Feb. 1959), working independently of each other,...

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