A Clean Well Lighted Place

During the time of Modernist literature there were several elements that were involved. One of these elements is the concept of finding a profound and sustaining meaning and existence in life and the difficulty that s involved in doing so. This idea of Modernist Literature is the concept of existentialism, which Jean Paul Sartre says, for humans, “existence precedes essence.” This means that there is nothing divine about our existence; we use our existence to try to generate an essence or a meaning to our life. The era of Modernism showed this human need for meaning in life. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Earnest Hemmingway, Solid Objects and Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf, and Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello,

He shows this through various dialogues between the characters. For example, in the story the older waiter says, “it was all a nothing and man was a nothing too.” When he substitutes the Spanish word “nada” (nothing) into his prayer, he is giving the implication of the “nothingness” and what people turn to, to find meaning, such as religion or prayer, is all nothing. The older waiter is a bit cynical when he recites the Lord’s Prayer because he replaces the words that have to do with God or heaven, with the word “nada”; “Our nada who art in nada . . .” The older waiter sees life as nothingness and has despair in his life. The idea that this literary work shows is that, in order to come out of this despair, you must find who you are, where you belong, and a definition to your identity. The younger waiter does not feel this despair because he has a job, a wife, and his youth still with him. The older waiter and the old man are at a point where they have to learn how to overcome this desolation and in order for them to do this is to find a greater meaning to their existence and act upon

In Solid Objects, the reader is introduced to a character by the name of John who is essentially obsessed with a desire to obtain solid objects. John finds an opaque piece of glass in the sand of the beach, and this object begins to occupy all of his attention and imagination. According to Woolf, “[the glass] pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore.” John was so enticed by this solid object that he did not see his friend, Charles walking up to him, for it captured all of his attention. John takes the piece of glass home, but later searches for more objects that showed more solidity for, “the determination to possess objects that even surpassed [the objects he already had] tormented the young man.” The next object was a piece of China he finds behind a fence while on the way to a meeting for work. John was finding comfort in these objects, so much so that he was distracted from his responsibilities of work. At this point John is putting so much of his comfort and attention into these objects that he did not fret or think twice when he lost the election for Parliament. This goes hand and hand with the concept of existentialism and the human desire to find meaning in life. The Mark on the Wall is another Modernist piece of literature by Virginia Woolf. This