Analysis Of A Clean Well Lighted Place By Ernest Hemingway

“A Clean Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway, demonstrates the different perspectives on a person and how it applies to each individual character’s views on life and the true meaning of it. The narrator describes each character and how each of them live their life with different morals, values, and different motives in which each person sets out to accomplish. In this short story, the narrator describes an elderly deaf man who comes into the café where the other characters work every night to drink his life away. The elderly man lives a lonely life, for the audience learns that his wife passed away and is survived by his niece. He is a man who has plenty of money, but who is in despair, so he sits in the well-lit cafe for his lonesome,

One of these characters is the older waiter. He himself has his own views on the elderly man staying late every night, and almost defends him with reasoning as to why the elderly man does stay until the late hours of the night because he can almost relate to him, “each night I am reluctant to close up because there is maybe someone who needs the café (Hemingway 145). The older waiter has quite a bit of views on other things as well such as, life’s purpose and how religions revolves around it. There’s a long passage towards the end of the story where the older waiter is telling the other waiter goodnight, but he continues the conversation with himself talking about verses in the bible and replacing the important words with the word “nada.” He specifically says, “it was all nothing and man was a nothing too” (Hemingway 146). He replaces the Spanish word nada (nothing) into the prayers that he recites which tells his religion, but with replacing the words it symbolizes that people turn the verses into a meaning and purpose, but its also a nothingness. Rather than reciting the actual words from the bible, “Our Father who art in heaven,” the older waiter says, “Our nada who art in nada” (Hemingway 146). Him saying this completely takes out the purpose of God, but also heaven all in a sentence. The older waiter, and other people who may need late-night cafes have the feeling of nothingness and