A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

The essence of existentialism takes a prominent role in Ernest Hemingway’s short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by underscoring the idea of life as a void of chaotic nothingness. In the opening paragraph, Hemingway’s immediate diagnosis of the old man’s condition as a suicidal drunkard despite his wealth demonstrates the idea that despair is unbiased and those who the realization of nothingness dons upon are left with a yearning to couple their internal incapacitations with temporary physical alleviations. Hemingway’s dogma depicts the self-crippling effects of the awful awareness that one’s life is essentially meaningless, creating a deepened sense of emotional distraught and existential questioning which, by extension, renders all else is meaningless, too.

To the casual eye, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” does not appear to have much merit. It is a plotless story lacking substance on which to feed the mind, but upon careful peruse, the story’s simplicity is sufficient to breed intense insight into sentimental nullity. The first signs of this emotional oppression by nothingness are found in the opening dialogue between two waiters in a café who discuss an old man’s reason for attempting suicide. They conclude the reason is “Nothing. He has plenty of money” (Hemingway 167). It is evident that the old man is experiencing a despair that he believes cannot be quelled except by death. His plan having failed, sobriety is unbearable, so he “[sits] in the shadow the leaves of the tree [make] against the electric light” of a café every night far beyond the stay of other customers; sometimes he drinks to the point he forgets to pay (Hemingway 167). The literal darkness in which the old man is shrouded is symbolic: black, which is the...

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...he niece, still young and unaware, believes she has saved him and given him the chance at eternal afterlife, but the old man finds no viability in religion and was actually trying to escape his present life (Bassett 1).

“A Clean Well-Lighted Place” is so artfully crafted to depict the idea of nothingness that the story itself is contrived as to leave the reader with nothing. The minimal details, the short, flat dialogue, and the lack of plot force the reader to feel the internal chaos that the old man and older waiter depict. There is no happy ending or any explanation, only a piercing need to occupy one’s mind elsewhere, to not think about what has been read, to find a clean, well-lighted place. Though the story advocated a lack of a meaning, a meaning in the story is clear: everything in life means nothing, alienation is inevitable, and death is a sweet finality.