Discuss Hemingway’s art of storytelling with reference to ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’.
Two waitpersons in a café in Spain keep watch on their last
client of the evening, an old and fat man who's a regular at the café and
drinks to excess. Discuss Hemingway’s art of storytelling with reference to ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’.They bandy the fact that he tried to commit self-murder the
week before, but that it couldn't have been over anything important because
he'd plenitude of plutocrat.
The old man asks for
another brandy and one of the waitpersons brings it to him. The two waitpersons
bandy their client further, saying his bastard plant him hanging himself and
cut him down to save his soul, and that without a woman he must be lonely.
One of the waitpersons is youngish than his coworker is, and
expresses desirousness to close up the café and get home to his woman. The
other one, a middle-aged man, defends the old man, saying that he stays so late
at the café every night because he has no bone to go home to.
Eventually, the youthful
server refuses the old man’s order for another drink, and the man pays and
leaves. The two waitpersons near up the café and the middle-aged one again
rebukes the other, saying he should have let the old man stay. Discuss Hemingway’s art of storytelling with reference to ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’.The middle-aged
server says he understands the old man’s disinclination to leave, and that he's
always reluctant to lock up because someone may “ need” the cafe because it's
clean, well lighted, and overshadowed by the leaves of trees. The youthful
server boasts that he has everything youth, confidence, and a job. The
middle-aged server says he and his coworker are indeed different, and that he
himself lacks everything but work.
The two waitpersons part and the youngish one goes home. The middle-aged server goes to a bar and begins a string of introspective musings. He reveals that he's reticent to close up the café each night because when he's alone he feels the presence of a great void, a dead of which he's hysterical. Life, he muses, is a great nothing and a man is a nothing as well. Discuss Hemingway’s art of storytelling with reference to ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’.God, he implies, is a nothing, and recites the Lord’s Prayer, fitting “ nada” in strategic locales. What he needs, he says, is light, scrap and order, an terrain like the café where he works, to get him through each day.
He wanders into a bar
and orders a small mug of wine. He notes to the barman that the bar is rugged,
and also he wanders out. He realizes again that he misses his own café, and
predicts that he'll have difficulty falling asleep. He muses on the possibility
that his depression is just due to wakefulness.
“ A Clean, Well Lighted Place” is Hemingway’s citation to a
type of empirical nihilism, an disquisition of the meaning, or warrant thereof,
of actuality. It easily expresses the gospel that underlies the Hemingway
canon, dwelling on themes of death, futility, meaninglessness, and depression.
Through the studies and words of a middle-aged Spanish server, Hemingway
encapsulates the main tenet of his empirical gospel. Discuss Hemingway’s art of storytelling with reference to ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’.Life is innately pointless
and leads inescapably to death, and the aged bone gets, the clearer these
trueness come and the less suitable bone is to put any kind of order on one’s
actuality or maintain any kind of positivity in one’s outlook.
The bases of
Hemingway’s gospel in this story are existentialism, a philosophical system began
in the 19th century by Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche and given full
play in the post WWI times by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, and nihilism, a affiliated philosophical system vulgarized
primarily by Nietzsche. Existentialism derives from the belief that actuality
is innately pointless and that individualities are solely responsible for
giving meaning to their own lives. They must put their own systems of values
and beliefs on themselves and overcome passions of despair and angst to live by
their own values. Discuss Hemingway’s art of storytelling with reference to ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’. In this way, they come “ authentic” individualities by
following their own principles. In existentialism, the existent is the unit of
actuality and the maturity of existentialists reject the actuality of a advanced
power, creator, or “ God,” and they're scornful of systematized religion.
Nihilism is a affiliated belief system that posits, generally, that life is
pointless, futile, and without morality, and that, contrary to existentialism,
no system of meaning or morality can be assessed on it by individualities or
anyone differently.
Hemingway’s particular brand of gospel in this story, as
expressed by the middle-aged server, can be described as empirical nihilism, a
combination of these two belief systems. Life is pointless and futile, he
argues, and though one may try to put meaning and order on one’s own actuality,
this trouble ultimately proves futile as death overtakes us all. Discuss Hemingway’s art of storytelling with reference to ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’. Hemingway,
like numerous of his generation, felt a sense of disillusionment and
disturbance following his traumatic gests during World War I, and his grasp of
empirical nihilism in this story can be seen as a response to this feeling.
The studies expressed
by the middle-aged server track exactly with the introductory tenets of
existentialism and nihilism. For illustration, the server explains “ What did
he sweat? It wasn't sweat or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It
was all a nothing and a man was nothing too.” This sentiment is a perfect
expression of empirical angst and nihilistic negation, the consummation that
life is emptiness, that a man’s life means nothing and that his actuality
signifies nothing to himself, nothing to others and nothing to the macrocosm.
Discuss Hemingway’s art of storytelling with reference to ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’. The server also expresses his particular way of dealing with this consummation
“ It was only that and light was each it demanded and a certain scrap and
order.” The server gravitates toward places that are lighted, clean, and
orderly, like the café where he works; this is his way of managing with
actuality, his own private set of conditions that help him get through each
day. Still, the fact that the server must leave the café and go home, which
depresses him and makes him unfit to sleep, implies that he's unfit to live his
entire life clinging to this system of light, scrap and order, and indicates
the fact that his own attempt to put meaning and structure on his life is
futile. The server is thus a failed existentialist, an existentialist who has
succumbed to depression and despair and sunk into nihilism.