Reaction Paper on Hemingway’s “a Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

Reaction Paper on Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

When reading Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” the story almost seems to have no point to it. There seemed to have no plot or main characters. It is a story about nothing. But after trying to read more into the story, I realize that the whole plot is that the story is about nothing.

The main character is an old, deaf man who sits at a café at 2:30 a.m. drinking brandy. As stated in the poem by one of the waiters, the old man is very wealthy and should have “nothing” to worry about. But what the waiter fails to see is that the old man feels nothing and that is what the old man has to worry about. I love how Hemingway uses the simplest story about a man at a café to represent how hard it is to live when you feel disconnected from the world. This deaf man needs an escape from his feeling of nothing, so he sits at a “clean, well-lighted” café to run away from this void. At first all I could see in this story is that a waiter is impatiently waiting for this old man to leave and that the older waiter is being more patient. Then I started to think about why might the older waiter be more patient? Is it because