A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
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Suliaman Zamarial
October 26, 2006
English 111-69
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
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 cafй 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.
To show the difference between the old man and the people around him, Hemingway contrasts light in the cafй and darkness inside the man which is growing into nothingness. Hemingway also uses the old man’s deafness as an image of separation from the rest of the world. The old man has reached to a point in his life where now he realizes the pointlessness of life and finds himself the lonely object of mockery. The image used by Hemingway in this story is the contrast of light and dark. The cafй is a “Clean, Well-Lighted Place”. It is a place to escape from the darkness of night. Darkness symbolizes fear and loneliness. The light symbolizes comfort and the company of others. The light calms the nerves while there is loneliness in the dark.
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 cafй, he might have preferred to miss the
conversation 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.”
Another tool Hemingway used in the story is the image of Nothing. Nothing is what the old man wants to escape. The Nothing is a ruthless boredom, unremitting by joy or woe. It is an eternal emptiness without comfort and awareness of each heartbeat. The heartbeat that is like the last heartbeat and refuses to give in to death. The emptiness of a life without a meaning is nothing and Nothing badly affects the man with a powerful grip. The only escape from this Nothing is death which the old man already tried.
“Last week he tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said.
“Why?”
“He was in despair.”
“What about?”
“Nothing.”
“How do you know it was nothing?”
“He has plenty of money.”
In this conversation between the two waiters, it shows that the old man had already tried to escape the Nothingness. The reason that the waiters know why it was Nothings is because he has plenty of money. Hemingway is convincing the reader to accept the fact that money means happiness. But he is also saying that the old man had plenty of money and he was still trying to commit suicide. This clearly shows that money is not happiness. If money was happiness, the old man wouldn’t kill himself, it’s the nothingness that he is trying to escape.
The old man is racked with despair at his loneliness, the darkness of his life, his segregation from the world and the Nothingness that pervades his existence. He wants to rest but he can’t. Even when he tried to take his own life, his niece cut him down from the noose. This old man is far from peace and the little relief he finds is incomplete like the artificial light of the cafй.
The old man drinks to get rid of the loneliness and nothingness that fills him, but at the same time he is disliked by the people around him. The two waiters are talking among themselves again and obviously about the old man when they say:
“Not