Critical Essay | Critical Essay by C. Harold Hurley

Critical Essay by C. Harold Hurley

SOURCE: “The Manuscript and the Dialogue of ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’: A Response to Warren Bennett,” in The Hemingway Review, Vol. II, No. 1, Fall, 1982, pp. 17-20.

In the following essay, Hurley maintains that Warren Bennett's “misinterpretation of the waiters' speech in the problematic exchange concerning the soldier and the girl compound rather than resolve the existing debate.”

Working from a recently discovered manuscript of Hemingway's “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Warren Bennett resolves many of the questions concerning the story's much debated dialogue.¹ As Bennett contends, the manuscript indeed “reveals how the illogical dialogue sequence may have occurred” (p. 616); “clarifies Hemingway's intention as to which waiter knows about the old man's suicide attempt” (p. 616); and demonstrates that Hemingway was himself to blame for “the problem that arises in that crucial sentence which was editorially reassigned by Scribner's” (p. 618). But in addressing “the problematic section of the...
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