Ernest Hemingway employs the literary tools of theme, symbol, and setting.
Ernest Hemingway explores several themes in his short story "A Clean, Well-Lighted
Place. Loyalty and solidarity are one of the themes that Hemingway uses
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The two old men the waiter and his customer share this common bond. The waiter is completely loyal to his patron, in part because of their age, and also because they …show more content…
He is drowning his sorrows in alcohol, but he gets some solace and peace in being in a quiet, warm, public place.
The old man's problem is clearly defined by the older waiter: He is old, deaf, alone in the world since his wife died and, though he has "plenty of money," he has
"despair." This despair is not a despair related solely to loneliness and old age but rather is related to the existential condition of the world that his wife, the older waiter suggests, helped him stave off and keep subdued. The young waiter's problem is that his job keeps him up and away from home until the wee hours of the morning; he never gets home until 3:00 a.m. He has a wife whom he never sees yet who waits for him nightly in their bed. This is his problem: youth and desire interrupted by the necessity of work. The older waiter's problem is that he feels the existential meaninglessness and disorder of life and has only his job to keep away nihilistic despair over this lack of order and meaning in life. His feelings of existential suffering keep him involved in providing order and meaning to others by providing a clean, well-lighted place …show more content…
The cafe is as you might imagine, clean and well-lighted. It's a pleasant cafe, and the light creates the shadows of leaves at night. The story is set late at night, and the café is quiet; only the two waiters and a single customer, the old man, sit there. Other than that, we don’t know anything about the place. We can guess that it's in Spain, or at least in a Spanish-speaking country. The specifics aren't important at all, and we just have to know that this is a good place to be on a dark lonely night.
Late at night in a Spanish cafe, an old man drinks brandy. A young waiter is angry; he wishes that the old man would leave so that he and an older waiter could close the cafe and go home. He insults the deaf old man and is painfully indifferent to the older waiter's feelings when he states that "an old man is a nasty thing." The older waiter, however, realizes that the old man drinking brandy after brandy is not nasty; he is only lonely.
Hemingway uses dichotomy to define theme, characters and setting in “Clean well- lighted place. A sad and depressing story of three different types of men. The one that has drink, the one that owns a café and the one that has a family. The image of despair, loneliness,