Mobin Jolfa

Oral Reproduction
24/2/2023
A Clean Well-Lighted Place
By Ernest Hemingway

Story title
The image of the café is central to the story; we get the feeling that outside of this clean, well-lighted
place, the world is nothing but chaos. Come to think of it, that's just how we feel about our favorite place.
So a “A Place” could mean a different comforting place or even person for anyone.

Author Biography
Ernest Hemingway, the famous author, and journalist was born in the affluent Chicago suburb of Oak
Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899. His father was a doctor; his mother was a musician. He was named after
his maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall. As a young man, he was interested in writing; he wrote for and
edited his high school’s newspaper, as well as the high school yearbook. Upon graduating from Oak Park
and River Forest High School in 1917, he worked for the Kansas City Star newspaper briefly, but in that
short time, he learned the writing style that would shape nearly all of his future work. As an ambulance
driver in Italy during World War I, Ernest Hemingway was wounded and spent several months in the
hospital. While there, he met and fell in love with a Red Cross nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. They
planned to marry; however, she became engaged to an Italian officer instead. This experience devastated
Hemingway, and Agnes became the basis for the female characters in his subsequent short stories “A
Very Short Story” (1925) and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), as well as the famous novel “A
Farewell To Arms” (1929). This would also start a pattern Ernest would repeat for the rest of his life –
leaving women before they had the chance to leave him first.
Ernest Hemingway began work as a journalist upon moving to Paris in the early 1920s, but he still found
time to write. He was at his most prolific in the 20s and 30s. His first short story collection, aptly titled
“Three Stories and Ten Poems,” was published in 1923. His next short story collection, “In Our Time,”
published in 1925, was the formal introduction of the vaunted Hemingway style to the rest of the world
and considered one of the most important works of 20th-century prose. He would then go on to write
some of the most famous works of the 20th century, including “A Farewell to Arms,” “The Sun Also
Rises,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “The Old Man and the Sea.” He also won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1954.
Ernest Hemingway lived most of his later years in Idaho. He began to suffer from paranoia, believing the
FBI was aggressively monitoring him. In November of 1960, he began frequent trips to the Mayo Clinic
in Rochester, Minnesota, for electroconvulsive therapy – colloquially known as “shock treatments.” He
had his final treatment on June 30, 1961. Two days later, on July 2, 1961, he committed suicide by
shooting himself in the mouth with a twelve-gauge shotgun. He was a few weeks short of his 62nd
birthday. This wound up being a recurring trend in his family; his father, as well as his brother and sister,
also died by committing suicide. The legend of Hemingway looms large, and his writing style is so
unique that it left a legacy in the literature that will endure forever.

The Story Beginning

. The story begins in a café, probably in Spain, late at night. There are two waiters, one young, one older,
and an old man. The waiters are discussing the old man, and one mentions that he tried to commit suicide
the previous week. The younger waiter is in a hurry to close the café and go home to his wife, and
eventually the old man, now drunk, leaves. The two waiters close the café and the older one stops off in a
bar on his way home.

The Story Ending

The ending of this story gets us every time – it's so simple! So elegant! So very Hemingway! Basically,
the protagonist (the older waiter) tries futilely to brush off his profound dissatisfaction with the world
around him, dismissing it as "only insomnia”. Furthermore, he reasons with himself by thinking that
"many must have it"– that is to say, many people in the world must suffer from the vague sense of
nothingness that plagues him. In a nutshell, that's basically the point Hemingway's making here: we all
end up in the same place of spiritual "insomnia," unable to make sense of a senseless world.
At the end of the story, the old waiter is alone in a cheap bar, a "bodega," which is well-lighted, but not
clean. Because he has been contemplating the concept of nada, he says, when the barman asks for his
order, "Nada," which prompts the barman to tell him (in Spanish) that he's crazy. Realizing the truth of
what he has heard, the old waiter responds with the now-well-known parody of the Lord's Prayer: "Our
nada who art in nada . . ."
Left alone, the old waiter is isolated with his knowledge that all is nothing. He is standing at a dirty,
unpolished bar. He cannot achieve even the dignity that the old man at the cafe possessed; he also knows
that he will not sleep. Perhaps he has insomnia, but we know better: The old waiter cannot sleep because
he is afraid of the darkness, afraid of nothingness. Hemingway himself suffered severe bouts of insomnia,
feeling alone and deserted in the universe.

Genre
Fiction
Modernism
Hemingway is something of an uneasy modernist. While he certainly broke through a lot of conventions
and dealt with some of the themes that we often associate with the genre of Modernism (post-WWI
disillusionment, alienation – you know, stuff like that), some of his novels and short stories are actually
fairly conventional, especially when compared to the more experimental writings of some of his buddies,
like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. This story, however, lives up to the modernist name; it is an
unconventional, super-short, psychological portrait of three characters. The inner monologue of the older
waiter briefly dips into the stream of consciousness mode, a technique made particularly famous by
Hemingway's contemporaries James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The story doesn't attempt to do anything
we expect a short story to do – there is no real conflict, and certainly no resolution. Rather, it simply
depicts a series of moments in everyday life.

Mood
The mood conveyed by the story is a melancholic mood for the old man because the young waiter wants
to go home and believes that his life is more meaningful than that of the old man’s when he stated that an
hour was “more [important] to [him] than to [the old man]”. This mood contributes to the story’s meaning
of contrasting light and dark, old and young, and how the old and young generations do not understand
each other’s rationales.
I'm in the way used mood to put in this short story in a very clever way. he made the setting a bar around
closing time which made the mood more mysterious because it's the night he also talked about an old man
trying to commit suicide which made the mood dark this topic also makes the story depressing because
the old man does not have anyone but his niece which is a depressing thought
Examples of mood in a clean real light place please are as follows it was late and everyone had left the
cafe this makes the mood dark and mysterious when you're read it you feel very curious and a little
scared. Last week he tried to commit suicide this contributes to the depressing mood because the old man
at the cafe had tried to commit suicide last week and he didn't have anyone except his niece.
We're right in a very minimalistic way It's mood barely changes this primal expression of solitary and
suffering characterizes the mood of Hemingway's modernism. This means that throughout Hemingway's
works you can feel the suffering of the characters. A mood of bitterness against darkness combined with a
determination to fight the darkness. This means that in a clean realized place there is a feeling of wanting
to defeat the darkness which is what the old man feels as he sits by himself in the well-lighted cafe.
Tone
Objective, Matter of Fact
Hemingway was not exactly a fan of high drama; in fact, even some of his most thrilling and adventurous
stories are told in his signature deadpan fashion. Sometimes this is funny, but at other times, it's also
devastatingly direct and striking. Here, the latter is true.

The unemotional narration of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" allows us to really digest what the
characters are saying. After all, most of the story is just dialogue, punctuated by a long paragraph of "nada
nada nada" – we have nothing else to focus on but the character's words and thoughts, and Hemingway
doesn't attempt to interfere with our interpretation of these things. He very rarely places any judgment on
his characters; for example, when the younger waiter tells the old man, "You should have killed yourself
last week" (7), another author might have been tempted to add some stern adjective in there to show how
rude the waiter is – perhaps "he said cruelly" or "he said unsympathetically." Hemingway, however, just
leaves it as it is, clean, simple, and unapologetic: "'You should have killed yourself last week,' he said."
Diction
Writing Style
Sparse, Simple, Unornamented – classic Hemingway
This short story is a terrific example of Hemingway's famous prose style. His writing is journalistic and
no-nonsense; he reports dialogue cleanly and directly, without any soft adjectives or fancy-pants
descriptions. This sparse, tight economy of words is one of the things that made Hemingway so very, very
famous in the 1920s, and his distinctive style is still much admired to this day.

Hemingway's Hemingwayness contributes to the bleak outlook of this story – instead of hearing about the
despair of the old man, phrased eloquently and poetically over a span of pages, we simply get a kind of
punch to the gut in this story. Its extreme shortness makes its point all the more powerful, and the direct
reportage of dialogue and inner monologue are far more effective here than any amount of descriptive
language could ever be. The most descriptive line we get, in fact, is the opening of the story, which, in
fact, barely tells us anything at all: "It was late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat
in the shadow of the leaves of the tree made against the electric light". We don't see the café, nor do we
know where it is or anything else about it – however, Hemingway manages to sketch out just enough of
the scene for us to create a feeling of the setting for us.

Setting
A clean, well-lighted café, somewhere in Spain
The setting is key here, especially since we have very little else to go on. The café is – as you might
imagine, clean. Oh yeah, and well-lighted. It's a pleasant café, and the light creates the shadows of leaves
at night. The story is set late at night, and the café is quiet; only the two waiters and a single customer, the
old man, sit there. Other than that, we actually don't know anything about the place. We can guess that it's
in Spain, or at least in a Spanish-speaking country (Hemingway had a real thing for Spain, especially at
this point in his life, so that's our guess). The location doesn't matter, though – actually, nothing else
matters. This café could be anywhere, at any time. The specifics aren't important at all, and we just have
to know that this is a good place to be on a dark lonely night.
The older waiter also briefly stops at a bar on his way home; the bar, though pleasant and well-lit, isn't
clean enough for his liking, and he doesn't linger there, choosing instead to return to his lonely home.

Plot
The plot is that the two waiters have to wait for the last customer to leave before closing. I think
Hemingway intentionally didn't write a complicated plot for his story because he wanted to Is there a
reader who must pay attention to the meaning of the story? I saw this on the web It looks like this: what
happens in this story? There is nothing. What does a character stand for? There is nothing. What is the
plot? There is nothing. I honestly can't see the plot unfolding in the story. There is nothing to argue. It's a
simple set of situations-we never get any kind of situation There is no action or deep "learning" about the
motivations of every character. Wasn't Seen what they are looking for and what they want to achieve, and
the best we can do is come up with something for them. Our own reason to be like them. Hemingway
makes us awe The story is over, but don't come out and solve anything for us. I think that's the point
Talk. Nothing matters, Hemingway wants us to focus on the main points of the story. there is nothing.

POV
Third Person Omniscient
We as readers have a privileged position here – Hemingway's omniscient third-person narration allows us
to see what's happening both inside and outside of the character's minds. We get hints of what's happening
with the younger waiter and the old man (for example, we know that the old man can feel the difference
when it's silent and that the younger waiter isn't actually a bad guy, he's just in a hurry). More
significantly, though, we get a close look at the inside of the older waiter's mind, where the true meaning
of the story is revealed.

Characterization
In typical Hemingway fashion, a lot of what we know about these characters comes from their dialogue.
We don't really get anything in the way of description – in fact, pretty much all we know about both the
old man and the younger waiter comes via conversation. Though the dialogue, which goes largely
unlabeled at first (we're not sure which of the two waiters is speaking), is initially kind of hard to follow,
we quickly learn to differentiate between the younger waiter and the older waiter. The younger waiter's
selfish desires come out clearly in his statements; he doesn't care about the loneliness or unhappiness of
the old man, and simply wants to get home to his waiting wife. The older waiter, on the other hand, is
sympathetic to the old man, and his musings reflect a certain understanding of what the old man wants
from the café – he sees it in himself.
Thoughts and Opinions
We only really see into the thoughts of one character, the older waiter. However, in this brief glimpse into
his mind, we glean a great deal of understanding; without letting us "in" for just a moment, Hemingway's
story would have been a lot less interesting, and a lot less accessible. In our brief foray into the older
waiter's thoughts, we see a continuation of his conversation with the younger waiter, in which he mentally
comments on what he sees as the emptiness of life – "nada y pues nada" (nothing and then nothing), a
statement that helps the rest of the events of the story fall into place for us.
Names
This is plain and simple: there aren't any. The characters here are simply identified by their traits or jobs –
the old man, the older waiter, the younger waiter, the soldier – and we don't get much more personal
information about them. While they're certainly individual characters, this choice implies a kind of
universality about them; for example, we feel like this isn't one specific old man in Spain, it could
be any old man out there in the world.
Characters
The Old 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—existential angst about his place
in the universe and 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

A deaf man who likes to drink at the café late into the night. The old man likes the shadows of the leaves
on the well-lit café terrace. Rumor has it that he tried to hang himself, he was once married, he has a lot of
money, and his niece takes care of him. He often gets drunk at the café and leaves without paying

The Young Waiter

Brash and insensitive, the younger waiter can’t see beyond himself. He readily admits that he isn’t lonely
and is eager to return home where his wife is waiting for him. He doesn’t seem to care that others can’t
say the same and doesn’t recognize that the café is a refuge for those who are lonely. The younger waiter
is immature and says rude things to the old man because he wants to close the café early. He seems
unaware that he won’t be young forever or that he may need a place to find solace later in life too. Unlike
the older waiter, who thinks deeply—perhaps too deeply—about life and those who struggle to face it, the
younger waiter demonstrates a dismissive attitude toward human life in general. For example, he says the
old man should have just gone ahead and killed himself and says that he “wouldn’t want to be that old.”
He himself has reason to live, and his whole life is ahead of him. “You have everything,” the older waiter
tells him. The younger waiter, immersed in happiness, doesn’t really understand that he is lucky, and he,
therefore, has little compassion or understanding for those who are lonely and still searching for meaning
in their lives.

Conflict
The young waiter has his "todo" -everything: love, money, health. He is happy and does not understand
why the old man and old waiter are unhappy. But ultimately he and we all must face the "nada"
(nothingness) in our lives. What is meaningful in life? Everyone needs meaning, light, in their life (Many
must have it… the story says). The old man and the old waiter both face the same internal conflict
(Hemingway would say it is everyone's conflict). The old man "needs" a clean well-lighted place to
combat the "nada" - nothingness in his life. The café is the symbol of meaning/light for the old man and
the old waiter. Spirituality, nature, love, art, maybe just a hot cup of coffee, these are "lights" for some.
The old man's internal conflict is man vs. himself (meaning vs. meaninglessness). The central idea of the
story is that we all must define meaning in our lives.
Symbols
The symbol of an empty, meaningless life, emotional darkness, surrounds the old man and the older
waiter. They both are victims of fear, inner loneliness, hopelessness, and "nada." They consider a "clean
well-lighted cafe" a refuge from the deserted night. For them, the cafe with all its light and cleanliness is
the only little oasis in the darkness where they can forget their fears. The old waiter says, "This is a clean
and pleasant cafe. It is well lighted. The light is very good . . .". Unfortunately, the light which calms their
nerves and brings warmth to their souls is temporary. Their lack of confidence does not let them defeat
the overwhelming darkness in their lives.

The Café
The café represents the opposite of nothingness: its cleanliness and good lighting suggest order and
clarity, whereas nothingness is chaotic, confusing, and dark. Because the café is so different from the
nothingness the older waiter describes, it serves as a natural refuge from the despair felt by those who are
acutely aware of the nothingness. In a clean, brightly lit café, despair can be controlled and even
temporarily forgotten. When the older waiter describes the nothingness that is life, he says, “It was only
that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.” It in the sentence is never defined, but
we can speculate about the waiter’s meaning: although life and man are nothing, light, cleanliness, and
order can serve as substance. They can help stave off the despair that comes from feeling completely
unanchored to anyone or anything. As long as a clean, well-lighted café exists, despair can be kept in
check

The Lord's Prayer.

The older waiter recites the Lord's Prayer to himself, replacing various nouns and verbs with the Spanish
word nada, which means "nothing." By reciting it in this way, he mocks the notion that religion can
provide meaning and comfort—instead, he finds this meaning and comfort in being able to frequent a
"clean, well-lighted" place at night to stave off loneliness, insomnia, and thoughts of his own mortality.
Because he believes there is "nothing," or no larger purpose to life, he may as well take comfort where he
can. In this way, he understands why the old man continues to come to the café to drink at night after his
failed attempt at suicide. The recitation of the modified Lord's Prayer reflects the upheaval in religious
belief that began around the end of the 19th century when philosophers began to scrutinize the influence
of industrialism and science on spiritual belief. By having the older waiter mock the Lord's Prayer,
Hemingway criticizes the notion that religion provides solace and comfort against feelings of dread and
futility.

The Soldier.
A girl and a soldier went by in the street. The street light shone on the brass number on his collar. The girl
wore no head covering and hurried beside him. This is the only time that the soldier is mentioned in the
story. One of the waiters says that he is likely to be picked up by the guard, presumably for being out after
curfew, or with a girl, or both. Although he appears only fleetingly, the soldier has a definite symbolic
value. He represents all the young people, busy with their own lives and desires, who do not need the
cafe. The younger waiter is a man of approximately the same type, but he is employed to work at the cafe,
though it has no emotional significance for him. For the older waiter, however, as well as for the old man
drinking brandy, the cafe has a spiritual role, as an oasis of light and order in a dark, threatening world.
This is why the older waiter is always reluctant to close for the night. Old, lonely people need a clean,
well-lighted place, for they are lost in the young virile.
"The old soldier symbolizes basic humanity: the need that any person has to enjoy the dignity of a clean,
quiet, well-lit place. We learn that the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it
was quiet and he felt the difference... The two waiters on duty have contrasting attitudes toward the old
man. One waiter is impatient with him, wishes he would leave, says he could go to another bar, and
shows, overall, no empathy toward him. The other waiter understands that this old soldier represents
humanity and should be treated with dignity. The other bars would force him to stand and would be
crowded and chaotic. The two waiters have the following conversation. The first waiter says This old man
is clean. He drinks without spilling. Even now, drunk. Look at him. The second waiter says I don't want
to look at him. I wish he would go home. He has no regard for those who must work. The story
emphasizes that for humans in despair and facing "nada" or nothing (we learn the old soldier has tried to
take his own life), the little things that affirm a person's humanity are all-important. Hemingway implies
that we are all potentially this everyman, facing despair, and we, therefore, should treat each other with
sensitivity and compassion. The soldier in this short story is a human representation of the stability that he
represents to the old deaf man. Soldiers live an orderly and predictable life, in many ways; they wear
uniforms, they live by a rigid hierarchy, and they are always duty-bound to their positions. All of these
aspects of a soldier's life can provide familiarity, comfort, and stability to the men and women involved in
the military world, much like the provides an element of familiarity, comfort, and stability for the old
man. Additionally, the soldier also serves as a symbol of the Lost Generation: the community of writers
and artists living in Paris in the 1920s, of which Ernest Hemingway was a member. These writers and
artists ruminated on the enormous losses of life sustained during World War I, and the fleeting presence
of the soldier is a subtle reminder of the enduring impact of World War I on society. This particular
interpretation of the presence of the soldier links the older waiter's attitude toward religion (as "nada," or
"nothing") to the existential crisis that Hemingway and his fellow intellectuals experienced as a result of
the war. A girl and a soldier went by. The street light shone on the brass number on his collar. The girl
wore no head covering and hurried beside him. In Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," an old
man, a heroic drunk who neatly replaces his cup without spilling his drink, quietly sits in the clean, well-
lit cafe that chases away his loneliness, if only for a time. Fresh and clean and bright like an early part of
the day, this cafe does not resemble the night of loneliness that the man must face when he goes home. It
is with the soldier's passing by the old man who sits in the shadows that the reader surmises that this
soldier represents order and the dictates of time and Death with the numbers on his collar, for after he
passes, the younger waiter comments, "The guard will pick him up" because the man has stayed at the
cafe too long and become inebriated.

The shadow of leaves.

Darkness in this short story symbolizes despair while light, especially when accompanied by cleanliness
and order, symbolizes a refuge from the chaos and nothingness ("nada") of the universe.
In this story, an old man sits in "the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light" of a
cafe. This is a pleasant setting, though the shadows reflect the sadness that hovers over the old man's life.
We learn that the old man recently tried to hang himself because of despair.
The light of the cafe provides the old man with a bulwark against his despair. This light represents safety.
The younger waiter is angry that the old man is lingering late in the cafe. The younger waiter wants to get
home to his wife. However, the older waiter understands why the old man stays, even though it is very
late at night. He feels a sense of compassion for the old man, with whom he identifies.
The light of the cafe stands for the light of compassion. In a meaningless post-World War, I world,
islands of compassion and light like the cafe are important to keeping despair at bay. A clean, well-lit cafe
may seem like very little in the larger scheme of things, but it is these little refuges that make life
bearable.

One symbol is the absence of the cafe. In other words, this absence represents nothing or "nada" as it is
said in the story. The old man seems to have nothing. His wife is gone; his only solace is having a drink
in the cafe. Without the cafe, there is nothing for him. The old waiter understands the empty feeling this
absence instills; the younger waiter has yet to understand or experience this in life. And according to the
old man and older waiter, the other bodegas don't provide the same kind of empathetic solace that the cafe
does. So, this notion of the absence of the cafe, nada, is an experiential symbol of loneliness and maybe
even chaos -- since the cafe provides some order for the old man, a light in the nothing.
The old man has attempted suicide because he was in despair about "nothing." He is deaf so he can hear
nothing. The light itself, more welcoming than the bodegas, is a "something" in the "nothing." Light is a
common symbol in literature and here it could symbolize simple presence (of warmth, humanity), order,
truth, and life (death symbolizing the light going out).
The old waiter's prayer filled with "nada" and "nothing" is an attempt to make sense of nothing, to give it
order and structure and meaning in the structure and spiritual significance of prayer. Likewise, the cafe
and the light, in particular, give some sense of structure and meaning, even empathy (to the old man). He
goes there every day, like a ritual meeting. And that is the symbolism of the prayer itself: just as the old
man seeks empathy in the cafe/light, the old waiter seeks empathy (someone else to understand him) with
his mocking attempt at prayer, another ritual. The ritual itself is symbolic as an attempt to find meaning.
The waiter concludes his night with more searching for empathy. "After all, he said to himself, it is
probably only insomnia. Many must have it." He reaches out to the "many." The need for empathy is, for
the old man and the older waiter, a reaching out for others as well as an escape from the loneliness of
(having) nothing.

Theme
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 nada”—effectively 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 cafés, however, the idea of
nothingness is overwhelming and leads to 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. The only way the old man can
deal with his despair now is to sit for hours in a clean, well-lit café. Deaf, he can feel the quietness of the
nighttime and the café, and although he is essentially in his own private world, sitting by himself in the
café is not the same as being alone. 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
man’s: he waits out the nighttime in cafés. He is particular about the type of café he likes: the café must
be well lit and clean. Bars and bodegas, although many are open all night, do not lessen despair because
they are not clean, and patrons often must stand at the bar rather than sit at a table. The old man and the
older waiter also glean solace from routine. The ritualistic café-sitting and drinking help them deal with
despair because it makes life predictable. Routine is something they can control and manage, unlike the
vast nothingness that surrounds them.

Irony
The individual’s responsibility to himself is to find a clean, well-lighted place or create one of his own.
The ironic paradox of the story is that meaning can be created only through an awareness of its absence.
Likewise, what is the main idea of A Clean Well-Lighted Place? The first theme of the story is loneliness.
Both the older waiter and the old man appreciate the cafe because it provides a « clean, well-lighted place
» to drink and hang out, providing an illusion of company, unlike their own homes, where they feel their
loneliness more acutely.
Also, what is the resolution of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place?
The resolution is when the old waiter decides that he likes the cafe better than the bar. « He disliked bars
and bodegas. A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing. »

Imagery
The most obvious image used by Hemingway in this story is that of the contrast between light and dark.
The cafe is a "Clean, Well-Lighted Place". It is a refuge from the darkness of the night outside. Darkness
is a symbol of fear and loneliness. The light symbolizes comfort and the company of others. There is
hopelessness in the dark, while the light calms the nerves. Unfortunately for the old man, this light is an
artificial one, and its peace is both temporary and incomplete.
Paradox
The individual's responsibility to himself is to find a clean, well-lighted place or create one of his own.
The ironic paradox of the story is that meaning can be created only through an awareness of its absence.

Metaphor
The pervading metaphor in this story, is, predictably, the clean, well-lighted place. To Hemingway, it
was much more than the physical darkness that frightened him-it was the symbolic darkness of reality.
Hemingway was a modernist, a realist, and a philosopher. He believed the ultimate purpose of life was to
discover such a clean, well-lighted place to escape from the darkness of the world-the dark truth that life
is without truth or meaning
So light represents any device man uses to distract himself from the darkness. The story's image of the
lighted cafe in the sea of dark nothingness perfectly symbolizes Hemingway's nihilistic view of a world
with no hope, no solace, no escape save that man creates for himself.

Style
Minimalism
A short story as glaringly brief and simplified as this one is rightly called “minimalist” in its aesthetics
(the word aesthetics refers to how the author tells his or her story). It uses the minimum building blocks
necessary to accomplish the job of telling a story. Hemingway uses simple diction, usually monosyllabic
words of Anglo-Saxon, as opposed to Latin, origin. Grammatically, he uses simply as opposed to
complex sentences. There is little figurative language—no metaphor or simile, for example. Character
and plot are minimized. These three characters do not even have names. All that happens is that the two
waiters talk, the old man drinks, and then they all go home.

Repetition
It is very clear to the reader what Hemingway does not do in this minimalist short story, but what does he
do? One thing he does beyond the narrative minimum is a repeat or repeat with a variation. For example,
the story opens with an old man “who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric
light.” A bit further in the story, the old man is said to sit “in the shadow of the leaves of the tree that
moved slightly in the wind.” And a few sentences later the old man is the one who is “sitting in the
shadow....” This repetition of the same with variation is the barest gesture at the figurative delights art can
offer. In repeating, Hemingway seems to acknowledge the beauty of pattern or artifice, but instead of
actually providing any he simply gestures at its possibility.
Socio-psychological elements

Dealing with loneliness and despair is part of the psychological element of the story. Many suffer from
despair, but everyone has to struggle alone. An old man who has no wife and only one niece to take care
of is visibly lonely. Hemingway shows that we may all feel lonely, desperate, and depressed, but at some
point we need to deal with it alone and find a clean and bright place to forget the pain. We need a place to
deal with our loneliness.