The theme of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is the ultimate “nothingness”. The theme is conceived based non “nada” which is beyond the clutches of male/female conflicts and draw attention to a “God abandoned world”, a world with nothing at the center. The characters in A Clean, Well-Lighted are deprived of sunshine in the midst of surrounding darkness. This story’s theme is of total resignation to living without any hope, and living with, NADA, nothingness.
The story is very simple. In a late night, at a clean well-lighted café, two waiters, one young, the other old serve an old man of eighty, who is the last customer. The customer is talking about his recent attempt to commit suicide. When the old man finally leaves the café, the waiters close the café and go to their respective homes. This simple story line is so well handled with copious application of controlled techniques, which leaves an un-erasable effect on the reader. With narratives and through the dialogue, Hemingway expertly brings out the striking contrast between the two waiters. He fills the story with the behaviour and attitude of the waiters, with the well-trained strokes of symbolism and irony, resulting in the telling effect of the nothingness of the night. Adopting this technique, Hemingway brings out the all-embracing sense of “nada” in the old man’s life. The story also reflects the personal traits from the life of Hemingway. The method adopted by Hemingway clearly brings out the despair and sorrow of the old man despite his possessing a lot of money, who leaves the clean well-lighted café only when he has to, albeit, “unsteadily but with dignity”.
In simple terms, Hemingway’s major concern is the violence in the heart of men and things. This predominant display of violence is achieved by his choice of characters and situations. Apart from violence, his short stories focus on shocks of experience, war, male-female relationship, all pervading nothingness and the praise for values.
The formal strategies he uses in highlighting his concerns are the one she learnt from Lionel Moise, a senior colleague when he was working with Kansas City Star. Moise emphasized that “pure objective writing is the only true form of story telling. No scream of consciousness nonsense; no playing dumb observer in one paragraph and God Almighty the next. In short no tricks.” Keeping this in view, Hemingway always tried to eliminate emotional exaggeration without making the mistake of emotional suppression. His ability in selecting the right facts, events and actions, instigated the inside emotions of the reader. In Hemingway’s own words, this gave out not only ‘What you really felt , rather than what you were supposed to feel and have been taught to feel.
Hemingway’s expertise in choosing the quintessential details of an experience in order to evoke the right emotions he intended, can be compared to what T.S. Eliot called “objective correlative”. Eliot’s definition of this is “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion, such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience are given the emotions is immediately evoked.’’ Hemingway also tried to replicate ‘the real thing’ which is the result of the right choice of details and consisted of ‘what really happened in action–the sequence of motion and fact, which made the emotion’. This is not an easy task. It involved, as per Earl Rovit, the transfer of the correct “emotion from the natural system to the texture of a prose narrative; for caught and frozen in the narrative, the emotion would be safe from the frittering of time and the distortion of memory.” Hemingway learnt this in a difficult way and used the technique effectively in the best of his prose writings.
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