A Clean Well Lighted Place

A detailed Summary of A Clean Well Lighted Place


"A Clean, Well Lighted Place:" The Story of Nada

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 cafe. 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


acters," "shows all the impatience of youth and an uncaring attitude towards the old man." The old man and the old waiter, on the other hand, are conscious of the "nothing[ness]" that surrounds them. The old waiter is preoccupied with the notion, "it [is] all [...] nothing and a man [is] nothing too." The old man, we are told, "tried to commit suicide." Both men can be described as broken, but they still have their dignity. For them life has "no priori order or value system, [...] on which [they] may intelligently depend and predict a future" (Bennett 75). The soldier too shares a bond with the older gentlemen. He is hurrying down the dark street with a woman presumed to be a prostitute after curfew. He is "disillusioned" and "no more concerned about military regulations then the old man is concerned about financial regulations" (Bennett 77). He seeks refuge from his life of rules and regulations, not with a clean, well lighted cafe, but the companionship of a woman.

The older waiter, 'imbued [...] with a dry humor," as Nathan Kotas describes him, uses subtle verbal irony; underst

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

Category: Novels

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