A Clean Well-Lighted Conflict

In accordance with Hemingway's style and conventions, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” is not really a story about a place, but rather about a particular set of mentalities which the place represents. The real story is told almost entirely through character dialogue which reveals what the existence of clean well-lighted places means to each. In this sense, the cafe in which most of the story takes place is as much a plot device to reveal character psychology and a deeper philosophy as it is a physical setting.

According to the William B. Bache criticism, Hemingway uses the characters of “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” to represent two conflicting ways of life: “The young waiter standing for a materialistic way of life: the older waiter and the old man standing for a nihilistic.” (1956) Bache later uses all three characters to create a sort of continuum of age-related conflict in which both spiritually devoid mentalities fall. At one end of the continuum the young waiter represents the materialistic viewpoint, though Bache also mentions that it has been suggested that the young waiter is already starting to become jaded with his materialistic notions and is on his way towards the nihilistic side of the continuum. Since Bache claims that “with the passage of time materialism often loses its meaning,” we can view the older waiter and the old man as representing two different stages of life which have progressed passed materialism and into nihilism. In this sense, the three characters can be seen not just as separate entities each representing the seemingly polar values of materialism and nihilism, but also as a threefold division of a greater philosophy which includes both of these mentalities.

There are several lines throughout the story which would seem to imply that the younger waiter's mentality is not purely materialistic, but is in fact already tarnished by the spots of nihilism which come with age. If we assume the lines “’Nothing’,” and “’He has plenty of money,’” are spoken by the young waiter, they become the first glimpses of his materialistic values that the reader is granted. According to the Joseph Gabriel criticism, if spoken by the young waiter “’Nothing,’” comes to mean “For no reason,” (1961) expressing the young waiter's materialistic notions that possession can bring happiness and therefore anyone with money has no reason to despair. He briefly breaks from this materialistic mentality, or at least seems to understand that it may not work for everyone, when he tells the old waiter “’A wife would be no good to him [the old man] now.’” In this sense the young waiter seems to recognize that the comfort he derives from knowing his wife is waiting for him at home cannot be the same for the old man who has lived long enough to see such things come and go. This is symbolic of the overall philosophy that materialism shifts towards nihilism with age, as the longer one lives the more things one sees fade away into nothingness. As Bache puts it, “From the older waiter to the old man lies a progression in despair, for the three characters are actually parts of an implied progression from youth through middle age to old age.” (1961)

The next glances the reader is given of the young waiter’s shifting mentality are in the exchanges between him and the old waiter after the old man is kicked out of the café. When the older waiter asks of the younger “’What is an hour?’” the response he is given is “’More to me [the young waiter] than to him [the old man].’” This clearly shows his materialistic tendencies, but can also be used to once again demonstrate that he can at least understand the nihilistic side. Perhaps the line which best reveals this shift comes shortly after this, and is one of the only places in the story where the young waiter’s dialogue is expanded upon with a brief glimpse of his thoughts.

“’No it is not’” are the most revealing words the young waiter says throughout the whole of “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” because they are the only words which explicitly express his understanding of ideas beyond his own materialistic notions. Every other place which would seem to indicate this same conclusion does so through implication, and each could very well be inferred as meaning something else entirely. What makes this line unique is narration which follows it: “He did not wish to be unjust. He was only in a hurry.” With these two short sentences, Hemingway tells the reader that the young waiter at least partially understands the meaning of the café, or clean well-lighted places in general. Had he been a pure representation of materialism, the young waiter almost certainly would not have agreed with the older one, or if he had it would have been only a method of ending a conversation which he cannot appreciate. The line “He did not wish to be unjust,” shows that the young waiter truly does believe what he says while “He was only in a hurry,” reinforces his materialistic side. With these brief, simple sentences, Hemingway shows us that the while the young waiter has mostly materialistic notions he is already beginning to adopt the nihilistic viewpoint of the older waiter.

Through these brief snippets of dialogue the reader can see the young waiter as “even now clutching at the straws of materialism.” (Barthes 1956) Since he would have killed himself if not for his niece's intervention, the old man clearly represents the extreme nihilistic end of the continuum. Barthes calls the older waiter the “truest symbol of modern man,” because, like most people, he is somewhere between the materialistic and nihilistic views. His utterance of the nihilistic Lord's Prayer shows that he is clearly leaning towards that end of the spectrum, yet his ability to understand both the young waiter's viewpoint and the stability of his job show that he is not so far gone as the old man.


Works Cited
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway". Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jenny Cromie. Vol. 40. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. 153-269. UMass Dartmouth. Gale. Literature Criticism Online. 15 December 2011