A Clean Well Lighted Place

Ernest Hemingway’s short-story “A Clean, Well Lighted Place” is a story of two very different waiters. The focus is on the older waiter whose nihilistic understanding, or “nada,” keeps him up at night. With this understanding he can empathize with the lonely old man that sits “in the shadow of the leaves” of the café. The younger waiter is more impatient and is ready to go home to the “wife waiting in bed for [him.]” He cares very little about the old man’s need for a dignified refuge at night. Using characterization and verbal irony the story illustrates what it means to cope with the harsh realization that everything we are and everything our society is based upon is empty.

There are two kinds of characters in “A Clean, Well Lighted Place:” those unaware of the perceived hollowness of life and those that are all too aware of it. The younger waiter is ignorant of the impending emptiness that awaits him; he is only concerned about going home to his wife and, as Nathan Kotas writes in his article “Text Anomalies and the Waiters’ Char

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” In other words, we need to cope with the emptiness of reality with a “clean, well lighted place” to occupy us away from “nada. By “nothing,” he actually means emptiness and in effect is empathizing with the old man. He seeks refuge from his life of rules and regulations, not with a clean, well lighted café, but the companionship of a woman. When you delve into the layers of characterization and irony you begin to see the uplifting tone in the story. acters,” “shows all the impatience of youth and an uncaring attitude towards the old man. Instead of being deeply disturbed and disillusioned, he is able to stand at the bar and smile at the cleverness of his inner monologue. In the final paragraph of the story he dismisses his inability to sleep as “insomnia,” but what is really bothering him is his “hyper-consciousness” of an empty meaningless existence (Benert 185). ” That “place,” or refuge, can take the shape of many things: a café, the arms of a woman or “youth and confidence. ” The old man, we are told, “tried to commit suicide. For them life has “no priori order or value system, […] on which [they] may intelligently depend and predict a future” (Bennett 75). Inwardly the older waiter says to himself his own little prayer: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name […]” as if to mock the existence of religion. ” At first reading, this sounds as if the old waiter is uncaring over the attempted suicide, but once you learn his sentiments about “nada” it can be understood that he is not being malicious. He is hurrying down the dark street with a woman presumed to be a prostitute after curfew.

The older waiter, ‘imbued […] with a dry humor,” as Nathan Kotas describes him, uses subtle verbal irony; understanding it is intrinsic to understanding the whole theme of the story. He knows “the world and himself, even his prayer [is] ‘nothing’ and by that act of awareness [can] survive with dignity” (Benert 185).

Common topics in this essay:
Clean Lighted, Nathan Kotas, Waiters Characters, clean lighted, Ernest Hemingways, clean lighted story, lighted story, verbal irony, nathan kotas, dignified refuge, benert 185, theme story, home wife,

Approximate Word count = 739
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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