A Clean, Well- Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway

✨ “Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.” ✨

Published in Scribner's Magazine in March 1933, ‘A Clean, Well-lighted Place’ by Ernest Hemingway is often dubbed his best work of all time. The short story revolves around a deaf old man who is in a cafe, having brandy and two waiters of the cafe who are trying to hurry him so that they can go home.

Written in his signature style i.e., the economical style of writing, Hemingway employs a minimalistic approach- he doesn’t use many adjectives to describe anything and he omits the dialogue tags of ‘he said, she said’ which makes the reading difficult but all the more interesting. He also applies the principle of ‘Iceberg’ where a part of the story is written on paper. This fragmentation of the story is what makes it modern (referring to modernism; see footnote 1). Thus the story is chiefly about the two waiters who are discussing a drunk old man.

Through this story, Hemingway portrays that life has no meaning- man is just an insignificant speck in a great sea of nothingness. This can be seen when the older waiter contemplates the idea of nothingness and says “It was all a nothing and man was a nothing too.” By constantly using the pronoun it, Hemingway confuses the readers and this confusion is essential as nothingness itself is confusing; it isn’t clear, it isn’t defined and no word can describe it.

Although laden with themes of existentialism, Hemingway wrote years before it was employed as a cultural idea.

The pace of the story is also confusing- the story seems to portray a fast-paced situation but the writing, the structure and the actions slows it down.

A must-read short story, Hemingway’s writing is simple. The plot is pellucid and interesting. The brilliance of this short story is highlighted when the reader reads between the lines.

1. When began in the early 20th century, Modernism movement came into existence due to the increasing industrialisation and globalisation. It identifies new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts and styles of literature after World War I (1914-1918). Modernism highlights the inner self and was preoccupied with society and how it was flawed. Literary works often were about civilisation and how the industrial growth has made us all inhuman and how grave were the times during and post-World War I. All modernist writers experimented with automatic writing- that is writing which has been freed from the control of the conscious, purposive mind. Writing of this time replaced the standard syntactic flow of language by fragmented utterances.