Criticism > Short Story Criticism > A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - Lawrence Broer (essay date 1976)

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - Lawrence Broer (essay date 1976)

Lawrence Broer (essay date 1976)

SOURCE: “The Iceberg in ‘A Clean Well-Lighted Place,’” in Lost Generation Journal, Vol. IV, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 1976, pp. 14-15, 21.

[In the following essay, Broer explores the bond between the old waiter and old customer in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”]

“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg,” Ernest Hemingway said about his craft. “There is seven-eights of it under the water for every part that shows.” In drawing attention to the often unsuspected depths in his work, Hemingway provides the ground for instruction in one of the major aesthetic principles of modern fiction: the art of indirection. What most modern writers have realized, and what Hemingway achieves so well in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” is that it is possible to convey a great many things on paper without stating them at all. The art of implication, of making one sentence say two or more...

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