A Clean Well-Lighted Place - Ernest Hemingway

Thesis Statement

In Hemingway's “A Clean, Well-lighted Place”, he shows us the loneliness, isolation, meaningless, death and futility of modern life those poor survivors of the world war one are facing through the description on the three main characters.

Introduction

The story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is written by Ernest Hemingway. In this story he shows the difference between the light and darkness. Hemingway mainly focuses on the pain suffered by an old man and the nothingness he feels inside him late one night. The setting of this story is in a café which seems to be in a Spanish speaking country or neighborhood because of the language usage in the story. In this story, the characters are not named but labeled such as the old man, the young waiter and the old waiter.

Analysis of the Characters Points of Views on Life

The Older Waiter

Like the old man, the older waiter likes to stay late at cafés, and he understands on a deep level why they are both reluctant to go home at night. He tries to explain it to the younger waiter by saying, “He stays up because he likes it,” but the younger waiter dismisses this and says that the old man is lonely. Indeed, both the old man and the older waiter are lonely. The old man lives alone with only a niece to look after him, and we never learn what happened to his wife. He drinks alone late into the night, getting drunk in cafés. The older waiter, too, is lonely. He lives alone and makes a habit of staying out late rather than going home to bed. But there is more to the older waiter's “insomnia,” as he calls it, than just loneliness. An unnamed, unspecified malaise seems to grip him. This malaise is not “a fear or dread,” as the older waiter clarifies to himself, but an overwhelming feeling of nothingness—an existential angst about his place in the universe and an uncertainty about the meaning of life. Whereas other people find meaning and comfort in religion, the older waiter dismisses religion as “nada”—nothing. The older waiter finds solace only in clean, well-lit cafés. There, life seems to make sense.

The old man's body is dark with effects of illness. His ears bring him a sort of shadows as they hold out the sounds of the world. His deafness is a powerful symbol used in the story, which shuts the old man out from the rest of the world. The old man recognizes that he is completely cut off from the sounds that he had not thought much of when he was a young man. This late night in the café, he might have preferred to miss theconversation about him between the waiters. The young waiter is sickened by the old man. He says, "I wouldn't want to be that old. An old man is a nasty thing."

The older waiter recognizes himself in the old man and sees his own ...