Critical Essay | Critical Essay by David Kerner

Critical Essay by David Kerner

SOURCE: “The Manuscripts Establishing Hemingway's Anti-Metronomic Dialogue,” in American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, Vol. 54, No. 3, October, 1982, pp. 385-96.

In the following essay, Kerner finds several examples of Hemingway's use of anti-metronomic lines of dialogue in his fiction and concurs with other critics who want to restore the original text of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

The one remaining step in the demonstration that two instances of anti-metronomic dialogue resolve the notorious crux in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is an examination of the manuscripts containing the forty other instances in the books Hemingway saw through the press.¹ This examination confirms beyond question thirty-eight of those passages, including—in manuscripts Hemingway wrote in pencil or typed himself—all seven instances of the pattern in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” when the older waiter is understood to be speaking both of these consecutive, unattributed lines:

“He must be eighty...
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