Critical Essay | Critical Essay by C. Harold Hurley

Critical Essay by C. Harold Hurley

SOURCE: “The Attribution of the Waiters' Second Speech in Hemingway's ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Winter, 1976, pp. 81-5.

In the following essay, Hurley takes issue with Hagopian's attribution of the some of the dialogue in the story, maintaining that the dialogue should be “consistent with the characters as revealed elsewhere in the story.”

John V. Hagopian's emendation of the much-disputed dialogue of Hemingway's “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” establishes that it is the older waiter, not the younger waiter, who knows of the old man's suicide attempt.¹ Each of the waiters' statements can now be identified unequivocally, except the controversial second exchange concerning the soldier and the girl. This passage, made more difficult by the omission of all explicit identifying tags, must be attributed correctly if the waiters are to be viewed as separate character types. But despite the lack of identifiers,...
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