Criticism > Short Story Criticism > A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - Scott MacDonald (essay date 1973)

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway - Scott MacDonald (essay date 1973)

Scott MacDonald (essay date 1973)

SOURCE: “The Confusion Dialogue in Hemingway's ‘Clean, Well-Lighted Place’: A Final Word?,” in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, 1973, pp. 93-101.

[In the following essay, MacDonald concurs with Charles Mays's interpretation of the dialogue in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” contending that Hemingway ignored normal dialogue conventions in several other fictional works.]

In his generally sensible, but somewhat precipitant article, “Is Hemingway's ‘Well-Lighted Place’ Really Clean Now?” Charles E. May shows how the long critical debate about the confusing dialogue in Hemingway's “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” resulted in Charles Scribner's Sons changing the text of the story.1 Until recently “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” was printed so that near the end of the long exchange which has caused so much confusion, the younger waiter says, “His niece looks...

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