Catherine C.

Apostol III-BEE

Text of Report in S-Eng 26

Survey of American Literature

A clean, well-lighted place

by

Ernest Hemingway

Early Life and Career

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now in Oak Park), Illinois.
In high school, Hemingway worked on his school newspaper, Trapeze and Tabula, writing
primarily about sports.
After graduation, he went to work for the Kansas City Star, gaining experience that would
later influence his distinctively stripped-down prose style.
In 1918, Hemingway went overseas to serve in World War I as an ambulance driver in the
Italian Army and He was awarded the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery.

Military Experience

There he met a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky.

Provided fodder for his works "A Very Short Story" and, more famously, A Farewell to Arms.
He met Hadley Richardson, the woman who would become his first wife.
In 1925, Hemingway published his first major work, In Our Time a series of loosely connected
short stories.
A year later he published the novel, The Sun Also Rises.
Hemingway and Hadley divorced, due in part to his affair with a woman named Pauline
Pfeiffer.
He continued to work on his book of short stories entitled Men Without Women.
After the birth of their son Patrick Hemingway in 1928, they settled in Key West, Florida.

Hemingway finished his celebrated World War I novel A Farewell to Arms, securing his
lasting place in the literary canon.
While reporting on the Spanish Civil War in 1937, he met a fellow war correspondent named
Martha Gellhorn and gathered material for his next novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).
Toward the end of the war in 1941, Hemingway met another war correspondent, Mary Welsh,
whom he would later marry after divorcing Martha Gellhorn.
In 1952, Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea which won the Pulitzer Prize and
 helped earn him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Personal Struggles

He wrote A Moveable Feast, a memoir of his years in Paris, and retired permanently to Idaho.
There he continued to battle with deteriorating mental and physical health.
Early on the morning of July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in his Ketchum
home.

A clean, well-lighted place

SUMMARY

In the late hours of night, at a clean well-lighted cafe, the two waiters, while attending upon
their last customer who is an old deaf man of eighty, intermittently they talk about the old
mans recently attempted suicide. The two waiters are contrasts.
The young waiter wants to go home to his wife early, and he is acting indifferent towards the
old customer and curses him for not leaving the cafe early. While the old waiter says he likes to
stay late at the cafe with all those who do not want to go to bed and who need light for the
night. The older waiter is reluctant to close up each night because he thinks that there maybe
someone who needs the caf. And when the man finally leaves the cafe, the younger waiter
closes the shutters and bid goodnight to the older waiter and go home, but the older waiter
continues to think about how important it is for a caf to be clean and well lit. He thinks that
music is never good to have at a caf and that standing at a bar isnt good either. He wonders
what hes afraid of, deciding that its not fear but just a familiar nothing.
Then, he says two prayers but substitutes nada (Spanish for nothing) for most of the words.
When he arrives at a bar, he orders a drink and tells the bartender that the bar isnt clean. The
bartender offers another drink, but the waiter leaves. He doesnt like bars, preferring cafs. He
knows that he will now go home and fall asleep when the sun comes up. He thinks he just has
insomnia, a common problem and many must have it.

Characters and Characterization

The Older Waiter - A compassionate man who understands why the old man wants to stay late
at the caf. And he enjoys staying late at cafs as well. He thinks its very important for a caf
to be clean and well lit, and he sees the caf as a refuge from despair. Rather than admit that he
is lonely, he tells himself that he has insomnia.

The Younger Waiter - An impatient young man who cares only about getting home to his
wife. The younger waiter is usually irritated with the old man because he must stay late and
serve him drinks. He does not seem to care why the old man stays so long. His only concern is
leaving as quickly as possible.
The Old Man - A deaf man who likes to drink at the caf late into the night. He had tried to
commit suicide but was saved by his niece. He is a daily visitor to the cafe and stays up
drinking till late in the night. He often gets drunk at the caf and leaves without paying.

Style of the Author

He includes only essential information, often omitting background information,
transitions, and dialogue tags such as he said or she said.
He often uses pronouns without clear antecedents, such as using the word it without
clarifying what it refers to.
Hemingway applies the iceberg principle to his stories: only the tip of the story is
visible on the page, while the rest is left underwaterunsaid.
Theory of Iceberg- In this type of writing there is always an underlying meaning which
is not immediately evident. Just like the mass of an iceberg which lies beneath the
surface, the crux of the story lies below the surface.
As said in one of Hemingways interview, I always try to write on the principle of the
iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you
know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.
The Deceptive Pacing of the Story
Hemingway does not waste words on changing scenes or marking the passage of time,
leaving it up to us to keep track of whats happening and the storys pacing.
The pace of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place may seem swift, but the action of the story
actually stretches out for much longer than it appears to.
Existentialism and the
Lost Generation
The term Lost Generation refers to the writers and artists living in Paris after World War
I.
The violence of World War I, also called the Great War, was unprecedented and
invalidated previous ideas about faith, life, and death.
Traditional values that focused on God, love, and manhood dissolved, leaving Lost
Generation writers adrift.
They struggled with moral and psychological aimlessness as they searched for the
meaning of life in a changed world.
Existentialism is a philosophical movement rooted in the work of the Danish philosopher
Soren Kierkegaard, who lived in the mid-1800s. The movement gained popularity in the
mid-1900s.
According to existentialists, life has no purpose, the universe is indifferent to human
beings, and humans must look to their own actions to create meaning, if it is possible to
create meaning at all.
 Symbol, Allegory and Imagery

THE CAF
It is a kind of idealized space; in it, even the loneliest, most despairing men can find some kind
of comfort. The caf represents a space in which one can escape from troubles in this case,
from the despair of everyday life.

Theme/s
LIFE AS NOTHINGNESS
In A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Hemingway suggests that life has no meaning and that
man is an insignificant speck in a great sea of nothingness. The older waiter makes this idea
as clear as he can when he says, It was all a nothing and man was a nothing too. When he
substitutes the Spanish word nada (nothing) into the prayers he recites, he indicates that
religion, to which many people turn to find meaning and purpose, is also just nothingness.
Rather than pray with the actual words, Our Father who art in heaven, the older waiter says,
Our nada who art in nadaeffectively wiping out both God and the idea of heaven in one
breath. Not everyone is aware of the nothingness, however. For example, the younger waiter
hurtles through his life hastily and happily, unaware of any reason why he should lament. For
the old man, the older waiter, and the other people who need late-night cafs, however, the
idea of nothingness is overwhelming and leads to despair.

THE STRUGGLE TO DEAL WITH DESPAIR

The old man and older waiter in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place struggle to find a way to deal
with their despair, but even their best method simply subdues the despair rather than cures it.
The old man has tried to stave off despair in several unsuccessful ways. We learn that he has
money, but money has not helped. We learn that he was once married, but he no longer has a
wife. We also learn that he has unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide in a desperate attempt
to quell the despair for good and the only way the old man can deal with his despair now is to
sit for hours in a clean, well-lit caf. On the other hand, the older waiter, in his mocking
prayers filled with the word nada, shows that religion is not a viable method of dealing with
despair, and his solution is the same as the old mans: he waits out the night-time in cafs.
The ritualistic caf-sitting and drinking helps them deal with despair.

REFERENCES:
SparkNotes Editors. (2007). SparkNote on A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. Retrieved July 15,
2017, from http://www.sparknotes.com/short-stories/a-clean-well-lighted-place/
http://www.url-der.org/a_clean_well_lighted_place.pdf