SOURCE: “Hemingway's Attention to ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’” in The Hemingway Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, Fall, 1993, pp. 48-62.

In the following essay, Kerner rejects Warren Bennett's position regarding the dialogue controversy and interprets the questionable passages in the story as Hemingway's deliberate use of anti-metronomic dialogue.

If our professed boredom with the controversy over the emendation in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is how we deny our evasion of Hemingway's challenge—for no one has explained the purpose of the clearly deliberate ambiguity in the dialogue—two new pieces of evidence may soften our reluctance to trust the unemended text. We haven't forgotten that in 1956 the poet Judson Jerome wrote Hemingway that since the third patch of dialogue opens as follows—

“He's drunk now,” he said.

“He's drunk every night.”

“What did he want to kill himself for?”

—and the first speech here is the younger waiter's, it “does not...