Analysis Of A Clean Well-Lighted Place By Ernest Hemingway

The Way Hemingway Writes the Two Waiters

Every writer is a unique writer. They have their own characteristics, which distinguish them from the others. Indeed, there is no definite method to define it. Nevertheless, there must be a general characteristics found in a writer’s works. Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest American authors, is famous for his economic style in forming stories. His style is basically the same in every of his story, concise and lacking of adjectives as well as adverbs, but might show some variation on dictions and structures in order to present the characters.

The distinctive features of writers are scrutinized from their style in language. According to Verdonk’s (2002: 3), style in language is individual linguistic

He uses short sentences most of the time. His choice of words is concise. He avoids using many adjectives and adverbs, and he prefers to describe things as they are. According to Roberts’ in his writing in “Hemingway 's Short Stories” on CliffNotes, Hemingway writes in “simple, direct, unadorned” way.

However, we can still see some differences in the dialogues of the characters. This can be seen as one of his ways to show the personality of the characters. The story is short and not involved many actions from the characters besides having conversations and thoughts in mind, which will be used to study some of the characters. The characters examined here are the waiters of the café. They appear the most often in this very short story, so it is easy to analyze their characters.

The first character examined is the young waiter who is in a hurry to go home. He wants to close the café as soon as possible because he does not like to go home so late. He acts somewhat bitterly to the old man at the café. It is shown from the way he tells his colleague about the old

According to Roberts’ and Jacobs’ (1989: 268), parallelism is “the repetition of the same grammatical form (nouns, verbs, phrases, clauses) to balance expressions, conserve words, and build up to climaxes.” This technique is recognized from the sentences which begin with “It was”. Moreover, Hemingway also uses words like all, never, too, and only. Those words are used to stress that the old waiter still thinks about the topic of the conversation. This also adds an argument that he is a sensitive person.

In conclusion, a writer, in this case is Ernest Hemingway, still keeps his economic style in his writing, but he varies his signature style to present the characters to readers. The two waiters from A Clean, Well-Lighted Place shows up the most often. Therefore, they can be an easy example to examine. Readers can see their character from style Hemingway used in the dialogues and internal thought.

Bibliography:

Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner, 1987.

Roberts, Edgar V. and Henry E, Jacobs. Fiction: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1989.

Roberts, James L. “Hemingway 's Short Stories”. CliffsNotes. (http://www.cliffsnotes.com). 28 May 2015

Verdonk, Peter. Stylistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press,