A Clean, Well-Lighted Place By Ernest Hemingway

Abstract
      There are two waiters that converse about this old man and how he visits the cafe everyday to drink brandy. One waiter tells the other that the old man tried to commit suicide last week, but neither know why. As they tell the man he must leave the older waiter expresses to the younger waiter that he likes working late into the night and being in a clean, well- lighted place at night.


Journal

            Ernest Hemingway was known for his short and to the point writings. In this story, “A clean, Well-Lighted Place” the writing was very short. There wasn’t much explanation to his writing he just told the story briefly without many adjectives, which was his style of writing. This style really confused me when I first read the story. I had to re-read it two more times to get the dialogue and the time transitions that he was expecting you to figure out on your own.

            The biggest symbol throughout the book was the difference between light and dark. He talked about an old man who always visited a cafe at night and how he must have like the light. There were two waiters, and the older one admitted he liked to be in a clean, lighted place at night. The reason for this odd request is because he didn’t want to be alone. He didn’t want to become depressed and absorbed in his feelings about how old he was. This is a key symbol showing that the older you get the more sensitive you are to the dark. I think this may be because death is associated with darkness and the older people are the closer to death they are.

            The main character that is found in this story is the old man who sits and drinks brandy all night. I think this character represents Ernest Hemingway. The old man is alone and doesn’t want to be in the dark. Ernest had four wives, which shows he never wanted to be alone at all. Also the old man in the story tried to commit suicide, but his niece caught him and stopped him. This is the case with Hemingway too, he had a gun to his head when his wife came in and convinced to put it down.  After this, throughout Hemingway’s life he became more and more paranoid of different things, for instance the FBI. He believed that the FBI was tracking his every move, which drove him to have paranoia.

            All of Ernest’s paranoia started when he was sitting at a restaurant in Ketchum and saw that there were lights on in the building beside him. This directly relates to the setting in the story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” maybe the old man watched something every night when he sat there drinking his brandy. Maybe what he saw was something that drove him crazy and into to paranoia just like what happened to Hemingway.