A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY

It was very late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the cafe knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.

"Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said.

"Why?"

"He was in despair."

"What about?"

"Nothing."

"How do you know it was nothing?"

"He has plenty of money."

They sat together at a table that was close against the wall near the door of the cafe and looked at the terrace where the tableswere all empty except where the old man sat in the shadow of the leaves of the tree that moved slightly in the wind. A girl and a soldier went by in the street. The street light shone on the brass number on his collar. The girl wore no head covering and hurried beside him.

"The guard will pick him up," one waiter said.

"What does it matter if he gets what he's after?"

"He had better get off the street now. The guard will get him. They went by five minutes ago."

The old man sitting in the shadow rapped on his saucer with his glass. The younger waiter went over to him.

"What do you want?"

The old man looked at him. "Another brandy," he said.

"You'll be drunk," the waiter said. The old man looked at him. The waiter went away.

"He'll stay all night," he said to his colleague. "I'm sleepy now.I never get into bed before three o'clock. He should have killed himself last week."

The waiter took the brandy bottle and another saucer from thecounter inside the cafe and marched out to the old man's table. Heput down the saucer and poured the glass full of brandy.

"You should have killed yourself last week," he said to the deafman. The old man motioned with his finger. "A little more," hesaid. The waiter poured on into the glass so that the brandy slopped over and ran down the stem into the top saucer of the pile."Thank you," the old man said. The waiter took the bottle back inside the cafe. He sat down at the table with his colleague again.

"He's drunk now," he said.

"He's drunk every night."

"What did he want to kill himself for?"

"How should I know."

"How did he do it?"

"He hung himself with a rope."

"Who cut him down?"

"His niece."

"Why did they do it?"

"Fear for his soul."

"How much money has he got?" "He's got plenty."

"He must be eighty years old."

"Anyway I should say he was eighty."

"I wish he would go home. I never get to bed before three o'clock.What kind of hour is that to go to bed?"

"He stays up because he likes it."

"He's lonely. I'm not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me."

"He had a wife once too."

"A wife would be no good to him now."

"You can't tell. He might be better with a wife."

"His niece looks after him. You said she cut him down."

"I know." "I wouldn't want to be that old. An old man is a nasty thing."

"Not always. This old man is clean. He drinks without spilling.Even now, drunk. Look at him."

"I don't want to look at him. I wish he would go home. He has no regard for those who must work."

The old man looked from his glass across the square, then over at the waiters.

"Another brandy," he said, pointing to his glass. The waiter who was in a hurry came over.

"Finished," he said, speaking with that omission of syntax stupid people employ when talking to drunken people or foreigners. "Nomore tonight. Close now."

"Another," said the old man.

"No. Finished." The waiter wiped the edge of the table with a towel and shook his head.

The old man stood up, slowly counted the saucers, took a leathercoin purse from his pocket and paid for the drinks, leaving half a peseta tip. The waiter watched him go down the street, a very oldman walking unsteadily but with dignity.

"Why didn't you let him stay and drink?" the unhurried waiter asked. They were putting up the shutters. "It is not half-past two."

"I want to go home to bed."

"What is an hour?"

"More to me than to him."

"An hour is the same."

"You talk like an old man yourself. He can buy a bottle and drinkat home."

"It's not the same."

"No, it is not," agreed the waiter with a wife. He did not wish to be unjust. He was only in a hurry.

"And you? You have no fear of going home before your usual hour?"

"Are you trying to insult me?"

"No, hombre, only to make a joke."

"No," the waiter who was in a hurry said, rising from pulling down the metal shutters. "I have confidence. I am all confidence."

"You have youth, confidence, and a job," the older waiter said."You have everything."

"And what do you lack?"

"Everything but work."

"You have everything I have."

"No. I have never had confidence and I am not young."

"Come on. Stop talking nonsense and lock up."

"I am of those who like to stay late at the cafe," the older waitersaid.

"With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."

"I want to go home and into bed."

"We are of two different kinds," the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. "It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the cafe."

"Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long."

"You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant cafe. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves."

"Good night," said the younger waiter.

"Good night," the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself, It was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that isp rovided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear ordread, It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all anothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived init and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y naday pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give usthis nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.

"What's yours?" asked the barman.

"Nada."

"Otro loco mas," said the barman and turned away.

"A little cup," said the waiter.

The barman poured it for him.

"The light is very bright and pleasant but the bar is unpolished,"the waiter said.

The barman looked at him but did not answer. It was too late at night for conversation.

"You want another copita?" the barman asked.

"No, thank you," said the waiter and went out. He disliked bars and bodegas. A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing. Now, without thinking further, he would go home to his room. Hewould lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it's probably only insomnia. Many must have it.

"Summary and Analysis of Clean, Well-Lighted Place"Two waiters in a café in Spain keep watch on their last customer of the evening, an old and wealthy man who is a regular at the café and drinks to excess. They discuss the fact that he tried to commit suicide the week before, but that it could not have been over anything important because he had plenty of money.

The old man asks for another brandy and one of the waiters brings it to him. The two waiters discuss their customer further, saying his niece found him hanging himself and cut him down to save his soul, and that without a wife he must be lonely.One of the waiters is younger than his colleague is, and expresses impatience to close up the café and get home to his wife. 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 one to go home to.Finally, the young waiter refuses the old man’s order for another drink, and the man pays and leaves. The two waiters close up the café and the middle-aged one again rebukes the other, saying he should have let the old man stay. The middle-aged waiter says he understands the old man’s reluctance to leave, and that he is always hesitant to lock up because someone may “need” the cafe because it is clean, well lighted, and overshadowed by the leaves of trees. The young waiter boasts that he has everything: youth, confidence, and a job. The middle-aged waiter says he and his colleague are indeed different, and that he himself lacks everything but work.The two waiters part and the younger one goes home. The middle-aged waiter goes to a bar and begins a string of introspective musings. He reveals that he is reluctant to close up the café each night because when he is alone he feels the presence of a great void, a nothingness of which he is afraid. Life, he muses, is a great nothing and a man is a nothing as well. God, he implies, is a nothing, and recites the Lord’s Prayer, inserting “nada” in strategic locations. What he needs, he says, is light, cleanness and order, an environment like the café where he works, to get him through each day.He wanders into a bar and orders a small cup of wine. He notes to the barman that the bar is unpolished, and then he wanders out. He realizes again that he misses his own café, and predicts that he will have difficulty falling asleep. He muses on the possibility that his depression is just due to insomnia.ANALYSIS“A Clean, Well Lighted Place” is Hemingway’s paean to a type of existential nihilism, an exploration of the meaning, or lack thereof, of existence. It clearly expresses the philosophy that underlies the Hemingway canon, dwelling on themes of death, futility, meaninglessness, and depression. Through the thoughts and words of a middle-aged Spanish waiter, Hemingway encapsulates the main tenet of his existential philosophy. Life is inherently meaningless and leads inevitably to death, and the older one gets, the clearer these truths become and the less able one is to impose any kind of order on one’s existence or maintain any kind of positivity in one’s outlook.The bases of Hemingway’s philosophy in this story are existentialism, a philosophical system originated in the 19th century by Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche and given full play in the post WWI years by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and nihilism, a related philosophical system popularized primarily by Nietzsche. Existentialism derives from the belief that existence is inherently meaningless and that individuals are solely responsible for giving meaning to their own lives. They must impose their own systems of values and beliefs on themselves and overcome feelings of despair and angst to live by their own values. In this way, they become “authentic” individuals by following their own principles. In existentialism, the individual is the unit of existence and the majority of existentialists reject the existence of a higher power, creator, or “God,” and they are scornful of organized religion. Nihilism is a related belief system that posits, generally, that life is meaningless, futile, and without morality, and that, contrary to existentialism, no system of meaning or morality can be imposed on it by individuals or anyone else.Hemingway’s particular brand of philosophy in this story, as expressed by the middle-aged waiter, can be described as existential nihilism, a combination of these two belief

systems. Life is meaningless and futile, he argues, and though one may try to impose meaning and order on one’s own existence, this effort eventually proves futile as death overtakes us all. Hemingway, like many of his generation, felt a sense of disillusionment and dislocation following his traumatic experiences during World War I, and his embrace of existential nihilism in this story can be seen as a reaction to this feeling.The thoughts expressed by the middle-aged waiter track exactly with the basic tenets of existentialism and nihilism. For example, the waiter explains: “What did he fear? It was not fear 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 existential angst and nihilistic negation, the realization that life is emptiness, that a man’s life means nothing and that his existence signifies nothing to himself, nothing to others and nothing to the universe. The waiter then expresses his particular way of dealing with this realization: “It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.” The waiter gravitates toward places that are lighted, clean, and orderly, like the café where he works; this is his way of coping with existence, his own private set of conditions that help him get through each day. However, the fact that the waiter must leave the café and go home, which depresses him and makes him unable to sleep, implies that he is unable to live his entire life adhering to this system of light, cleanness and order, and indicates the fact that his own attempt to impose meaning and structure on his life is futile. The waiter is therefore a failed existentialist, an existentialist who has succumbed to depression and despair and sunk into nihilism.In addition, the waiter expresses a sentiment common to most existentialists and nihilists: God does not exist. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name,” he says, echoing the Lord’s Prayer but glorifying “nada.” The repetition of “nada” throughout this comparatively long paragraph serves simultaneously to increase the intensity and urgency of the tone, and to make the entire passage sound slightly absurd.The words and actions of the middle-aged waiter form the basic philosophical structure of “A Clean, Well Lighted Place,” but Hemingway sharply contrasts his beliefs with those of the other two characters, the young waiter and the old man. Unlike the middle-aged waiter, the young waiter is in a hurry; he has something to live for, namely, getting home to his wife. He has “everything,” “youth, confidence, and a job.” He seems to have everything going for him and retains his purpose in life; he does not seem to understand the depression that has overtaken his colleague, nor why his colleague is drawn to the “clean, well lighted” café.The old man is at a different stage of his life from both the young and middle-aged waiters. He has already tried to take his own life once because “he was in despair” over “nothing,” and stays drinking late at the café because he does not want to go home and because he is lonely. Hemingway does not give the reader as much insight into the old man’s thoughts as into those of the two waiters, so it is difficult to say whether the old man’s despair is of the existential nihilistic variety or is due to a death in the family or any number of other depressing occurrences. On the other hand, the “nothing” that he is in despair over echoes the “nada” of the middle-aged waiter’s later soliloquy, and suggests that the old man has simply gotten tired of the futility of existence and that’s why he attempted suicide.Hemingway scholars have commented on the presence of three characters in three different stages of life as an allegory demonstrating the progression of an individual’s

outlook on life as that individual gets older. At first, the individual lives confidently and unthinkingly, accepting the conventions of job and family as sufficient to give meaning to his or her (in this case, his) life, but as he gets older, he begins to question the types of meaning that have been imposed on his existence and finds them hollow. He may attempt to impose his own set of meanings and values on himself, but ultimately, Hemingway implies, he will fail and slip into the realization that life is nothing and he is nothing. Once this realization is reached and he grows old, he falls into despair at the nearness of death and the futility of his life, and may well choose to end his existence on his own terms rather than wait for events to overtake him. Perhaps, with this choice, he is finally able to take some control over his destiny.

Hemingway, it has often been observed, was obsessed with death, and that obsession can be seen clearly in this story. In fact, his philosophy as expressed by this story can be understood more clearly when considered in relation to death than in relation to life. Life is futile and meaningless because the individual cannot prevent death from overtaking him; his nihilism results not so much from wondering about the meaning of existence than from wondering about the inevitability, meaning, and purpose of death.There is a simpler explanation for the difference between the depression felt by the middle-aged waiter and old man and the confidence felt by the young waiter: the young waiter is the only one with a wife. It is either because he has a wife or because the fact that he has a wife means that he is not lonely that the young waiter expresses some optimism in his outlook. He himself dismisses his colleague’s suggestion that the old man might be less unhappy with a wife, but this suggestion is obviously born of experience as the middle-aged waiter speaks of dreading another long, sleepless night spent alone in his bedroom. The presence or absence of a wife, however, is likely significant only because if one is alone with one’s thoughts, one is more likely to despair than if one is in company.One interesting aspect of this story is the fact that the original edition of it seemed to mix up the lines of dialogue between the young and the middle-aged waiters in multiple places. For example, at one point, the young waiter seemed to have the information about the old man’s suicide attempt, and at another point, it was the middle-aged waiter. Hemingway designates the speaker in some of these exchanges as “one waiter,” rather than “young waiter” or “older waiter.” Some critics have dismissed this discrepancy as a typographical error or a result of Hemingway’s idiosyncratic way of writing dialogue and subsequent editions of the story have imposed consistency on the dialogue, but revisionist critics have urged that Hemingway’s original edition should be reinstated. The confusion, they have argued, was deliberately created in order to imply that the speaker could be either the young waiter or the older one; this interchangeability supports the view that the story is an allegory exploring the progression of one’s outlook on life from youth to age.In terms of imagery, the story uses a number of contrasts to enhance its philosophical meaning: youth and age, darkness and light, cleanness and filthiness, noise and quiet, and nature (shadows of leaves) and manmade objects (coffee machine).

Theme Analysis

Hemingway's theme in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is a theme that runs through all of his literature: there is no God, no meaning to this world, and man must consequently find something to distract himself from his horrible truth. For the older waiter, a clean, well-lighted café is such an escape. This is an artificial light, made by man for man, yet it is the only way to step out of the darkness of reality: that life is filled with nothing meaningful.

This completely nihilistic worldview glorifies individuals, like the veteran waiter and the elderly drinker, who find a method of coping with life's hardships in a graceful, dignified manner. Though the old man is drunk, he isn't rude or unruly, but polite and well behaved. Despite the obvious hardships in his life (since he attempts suicide), he doesn't lose his cool, but stays in control of himself, exhibiting grace under pressure. Such grace, Hemingway asserts, should be the goal of every individual.

Character Profiles

Old Man: The elderly, deaf gentleman who drinks gracefully near the back of the café, outside, is the main subject of discussion for the waiters, who are starting to close up for the night. The waiters gossip with one another about the man's attempted suicide the previous week, and speculate about other aspects of his life. It seems the man drinks at the café every night, alone, to pass the time in a clean, well-lighted environment.

Young Waiter: The young waiter is impatient with the old man, hoping to return home to his wife by a decent hour. He doesn't understand how important it is to offer such a clean, well-lighted place to his customer.

Older Waiter: The veteran waiter, like Hemingway, understands the deeper things in life, believing strongly that he must keep the café open in order to let others stay in the light, as he wishes also to remain in the light. Unable to bear the darkness of his world, the waiter walks the streets late in the night, not being able to sleep until morning.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory

The Café

The clean, well-lighted café of the story's title is its central image. This kind of café is a kind of idealized space; in it, even the loneliest, most despairing of men can find some kind of comfort. The café represents a space in which one can escape from troubles – in this case, from the despair of everyday life. The older waiter explains why these specific elements are necessary in his ideal space: he needs the café to be clean and quiet (music is absolutely out), and most importantly, he requires a lot of light. But why? What does that light do for these characters? Why can't the older waiter or the old man be content to sit in a dimly-lit bar to drink undisturbed? 

The answer is simple – light chases away the dark. You know that feeling of insecurity and dread that can creep in at night? That's what these characters are feeling; the older waiter expresses it best when he describes the awful nothingness of life – "nada y pues nada y pues nada" (14). Nothing can offer him comfort, and this vast spiritual emptiness is overwhelming. Hemingway suggests that only the light of a pleasant café, and the numbing effect of drunkenness, can push away the dark realization that we are all nothing.