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Ernest Hemingway captures the essence and origins of nihilistic thought in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”, written in a time of religious and moral confusion shortly after The Great War. The ideas expressed in this short story represent the post World War 1 thinking of Hemingway, and the notoriously nihilistic Lost Generation in Paris, which was greatly influenced by the many traumas of war. Learning from his unnerving experiences in battle, Hemingway enforces the idea that all humans will inevitably fade into eternal nothingness and everything valued by humans is worthless. He develops this idea by creating a brilliant mockery of two coveted religious documents, revealing authority figures as typical, despicable, human beings, and reducing life into the most raw, simplistic, and frightening reality imaginable. He states that all humans will naturally die alone and literally be “in despair” about “nothing” (494), and that people will either seek a “calm and pleasant cafe” (496), or a self-inflicted death simply to escape despair. Undoubtedly, Hemingway destroys any existence of a higher meaning because, in reality “[life is] all a nothing, and a man [is] nothing too” (496). By viewing the actions of three different generations, Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” elaborates on the idea that life is not continual enlightenment and growth, but gradual despair, and an inevitable death into “nada” (497). The youthful and confident waiter, representing the youngest of the three male generations, is the only apparent spec of existentialist thought in the story. However, this young man is simply an unconcerned person due to his age; he is not in despair because the end of his existence is not breathing down his neck at thi... ... middle of paper ... ..., Well-Lighted Place”, represent the opinions and views of one typical person, in one ordinary life. The theme of a world of nothingness is overwhelming to the human brain, and almost inconceivable, and everything we do in this life is simply designed to help us take our mind off of death; suicide is the ultimate escape from “despair” over “nothing” (494). Hemingway’s brilliant transitions in time explain how life eventually grows worse with age, and humans will succumb to suicide, drunkenness, or something comforting and safe, much like a clean, well-lighted cafe. Further, Hemingway has shown the world that man has created many bogus ways to cope with the insurmountable fear of nothingness, namely religion. People can try to kid their selves into feeling soulful, genuine, or meaningful, but there is no need to “fear for [the human] soul”, as it is non-existent.
The main focus of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is on the pain of old age suffered by a man that we meet in a cafe late one night. Hemingway contrasts light and dark to show the difference between this man and the young people around him, and uses his deafness as an image of his separation from the rest of the world.
More than death itself, Harwood’s poetry shows how many people fail to accept death. Their belief in immortality and fear of the end is also potrayed in Nightfall. Although when the subject of the poem is death, the words describe life, as if reluctant to face up to reality. The images are of suburbs, lights, birds and trees. Even with so many experiences, many of us will forever be ignorant seems to be the truth ringing perpetually though Harwood’s verses.
The delineation of human life is perceiving existence through resolute contrasts. The difference between day and night is defined by an absolute line of division. For the Jewish culture in the twentieth century, the dissimilarity between life and death is bisected by a definitive line - the Holocaust. Accounts of life during the genocide of the Jewish culture emerged from within the considerable array of Holocaust survivors, among of which are Elie Wiesel’s Night and Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. Both accounts of the Holocaust diverge in the main concepts in each work; Wiesel and Wiesenthal focus on different aspects of their survivals. Aside from the themes, various aspects, including perception, structure, organization, and flow of arguments in each work, also contrast from one another. Although both Night and The Sunflower are recollections of the persistence of life during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal focus on different aspects of their existence during the atrocity in their corresponding works.
In the experimental novel The Stranger by Albert Camus, he explores the concept of existentialism and the idea that humans are born into nothing and descend into nothingness after death. The novel takes place in the French colony of Algiers where the French-Algerians working-class colonists live in an urban setting where simple life pleasures are of the upmost importance in the lives of working class people like the protagonist of the novel Meursault. What is fascinating about this novel is that it opens up with a scene of perpetual misfortune for him through the death of his mother although he seems to express otherwise. The reader perceives this nonchalance as a lack of care. Maman’s death and its impact on Meursault appear in both the very beginning and very end of the two-part novel, suggesting a cyclical pattern in the structure. This cyclical pattern suggests not a change in the moral beliefs of Meursault but rather his registering society’s systems and beliefs and craft meaning in his own life despite the fact that he meets his demise in the end. Camus uses Maman’s funeral to characterise both Meursault and the society and customs created by the society Meursault lives in in order to contrast the two while at the same time reveal how while society changes, Meursault does not. Rather, Maman’s funeral becomes of unprecedented importance in Meursault’s life and allows him to find that nothing means anything in his meaningless world at the time of his death. He finds peace in that.
...ke Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who cast off the beliefs of post World War I America. Many of these thinkers moved to Paris and try to make find meaning in their meaningless lives. They would throw wild parties, "drink excessively, and have scandalous love affairs (Kaiser)." They gained prominent places in the twentieth century because of their spiritual alienation. Loss of faith may cause fame and fortune, as it did for the lost generation, but with this loss came inescapable emptiness.
Ernest Hemingway's WWI classic, A Farewell to Arms is a story of initiation in which the growth of the protagonist, Frederic Henry, is recounted. Frederic is initially a naïve and unreflective boy who cannot grasp the meaning of the war in which he is so dedicated, nor the significance of his lover's predictions about his future. He cannot place himself amidst the turmoil that surrounds him and therefore, is unable to fully justify a world of death and destruction. Ultimately, his distinction between his failed relationship with Catherine Barkley and the devastation of the war allows him to mature and arrive at the resolution that the only thing one can be sure of in the course of life is death and personal obliteration (Phelan 54).
Myra, who is dying of illness, escapes the confinement of her stuffy, dark apartment. She refuses to succumb to death in an insubordinate manner. By leaving the apartment and embracing open space, Myra rejects the societal pressure to be a kept woman. Myra did not want to die “like this, alone with [her] mortal enemy” (Cather, 85). Myra wanted to recapture the independence she sacrificed when eloping with Oswald. In leaving the apartment, Myra simultaneously conveys her disapproval for the meager lifestyle that her husband provides for her and the impetus that a woman needs a man to provide for her at all. Myra chose to die alone in an open space – away from the confinement of the hotel walls that served as reminders of her poverty and the marriage that stripped her of wealth and status. She wished to be “cremated and her ashes buried ‘in some lonely unfrequented place in the mountains, or in the sea” (Cather, 83). She wished to be alone once she died, she wanted freedom from quarantining walls and the institution of marriage that had deprived her of affluence and happiness. Myra died “wrapped in her blankets, leaning against the cedar trunk, facing the sea…the ebony crucifix in her hands” (Cather, 82). She died on her own terms, unconstrained by a male, and unbounded by space that symbolized her socioeconomic standing. The setting she died in was the complete opposite of the space she had lived in with Oswald: It was free space amid open air. She reverted back to the religious views of her youth, symbolizing her desire to recant her ‘sin’ of leaving her uncle for Oswald, and thus abandoning her wealth. “In religion , desire was fulfillment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded”( Cather, 77), it was not the “object of the quest that brought satisfaction” (Cather, 77). Therefore, Myra ends back where she began; she dies holding onto
Hemingway joined the “Lost Generation” crowd during his hardships. During these years people spent time aimlessly walking around. They didn’t think there was a purpose to their lives. In the book, the characters wandered together through an “endless, drunken procession of parties, cafes, and sexual affairs,” in a desperate search for meaning to their lives. Some of the story Jake tells the reader lies between the lines in the book, possibly symbolizing the absence of meaning in the characters’ lives.
The slow feeling of the ending life is shown when the poem states, “we paused before…” with other terms like “and immortality” having its own line to emphasize the destination. The writer narrates the cause of death in the six-stanza poem in a journey form that depicts some interesting life experiences that people should have fun of during their lives. It is common that many individuals cannot stop for or wait for death that is if they can “see
... the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. O’Brien asks the question, If life is absurd and meaningless, why couldn’t death be absurd and meaningless? To tie this back to consciousness, O’Brien shows that just because it cannot be seen, how do we know it doesn’t exist? All of Freud’s findings are essentially as meaningless as the world O’Brien has created; an existentialist world of chaos and that the notion of the absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning to be found in the world beyond what meaning we give to it. It is O’Brien’s introduction to the world of bicycles having characteristics of humans and boxes, so tiny they camnnot be seen, and elevators into eternity, we are asked to suspend disbelief and understand O’Brien’s satire.
Smith, Carol H., 'Women and the Loss of Eden,'; Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context, Ed. James Nagel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp132-4. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Earnest Hemingways The Sun Also Rises, ed. James Nagel. New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 1995. 54-
From an early age, Ernest Hemingway found himself obsessed with the subject of heroism. He looked up to his grandfather, who he saw as a hero, and sought to fulfill the war legacy left behind by joining the army. Hemingway was a participant in many wars, but one in particular shaped the rest of his life and his outlook on the world. It was during the end of World War I and Hemingway was serving the Italian army as an ambulance driver. During the battle at Fossalta di Piave, Hemingway circulated the trenches with chocolates, providing them to soldiers. Out of nowhere, an Austrian trench mortar shell exploded a few feet away from Hemingway, killing one man and wounding many others (Meyers, p.30). Hemingway was one of these wounded men. It was once said by Ted Brumback that Hemingway had acted heroically, for once he regained consciousness, he picked up a wounded man and carried him to the first aid dugout despite his own serious leg wounds (Meyers, p.30). Considered the turning point in his life, Hemingway had faced death but been called a “hero” as a result of it. Even though Hemingway’s obsession with heroism was still prevalent throughout his life, and this event on July 8, 1918, made its way into many of his novels, the heroes Hemingway wrote about never forsook glory or fortune. They were more concerned with the righting of wrongs and the longing of experience (Baker (2), p.129). In Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell to Arms, the protagonist Frederic Henry is more obviously a form of Hemingway, but also a prime example of the heroes Hemingway liked to write about. Even though Henry faced danger, pain, and death throughout this wartime novel, none of it was glorified. Despite his obsession with heroism in war, while writing the novel...
The search for immortality is not an uncommon one in literature. Many authors and poets find contentment within the ideals of faith and divinity; others, such as Whitman and Stevens, achieve satisfaction with the concept of the immortality of mortality. This understanding of the cycle of death and rebirth dominates both Walt Whitman's "On the Beach at Night" and Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning" and demonstrates the poets' philosophies of worldly immortality.
An article published in 1913 titled, “Chronicle and Comment” from The Bookman highlights some of the negative criticism that Ernest Hemingway received. In this article, criticism is given towards Hemingway’s work based on support of another review titled, “What is Dirt?” by Robert Herrick. Here, the authors feel that Hemingway’s work is merely a picture of contemporary life rather than a contribution to literature. When looking at the love story between Catherine and Frederick, the article cheapens the love story by claiming that it is “the story of a Scotch nurse made irresponsible by heartbreak and an American...
In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway demonstrates nihilism through Jordan’s view of death. Coming to face death, Jordan states, “That’s what it will be like. Like a cool drink of water. You’re a liar. It will just be nothing. That’s all it will be. Just nothing” (FWTBT, 470). Faced with death alone, Jordan views death as not even an event; he believes it as an escape from the current complications of his life. On this idea, Emil Cioran, a famous nihilist philosopher, explains, “The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude…In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.” Death