Criticism > Short Story Criticism > A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - Otto Reinert (essay date 1959)

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - Otto Reinert (essay date 1959)

Otto Reinert (essay date 1959)

SOURCE: “Hemingway's Waiters Once More,” in College English, Vol. 20, No. 8, May, 1959, pp. 417-18.

[In the following essay, Reinert perceives the inconsistent and confusing dialogue in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” as a result of Hemingway's utilization of anti-metronomic dialogue.]

In the February College English Mr. Kroeger and Professor Colburn find “confusion” and “inconsistency” in the distribution of speeches between the old and the young waiter in Hemingway's “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” I don't presume to know what “this generation of close readers has been doing” about the problem “all this time,” but I suspect they have been assuming, as I have, that the difficulty arises from Hemingway's violation of one of the unwritten rules of the art of presenting dialogue visually. The rule is that a new, indented line implies a new speaker. It is a useful rule, but it is...

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