APLaC Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well Lighted Place ...

APLaC
Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
Name_________________________________________________
1. How do you react to the author’s economy of detail? Is this technique similar to/different from that in

other stories you have read?

2. Why are all the characters nameless? What is the relationship between the two waiters?

3. How can the deaf old man feel the difference at night? Why was he in despair?

4. Explain the significance of the waiter’s comment: “He has plenty of money.”

5. The image of women in Hemingway’s work is somewhat quixotic (look it up!)—does this
characteristic have any bearing on this story?

APLaC
Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
6. Why is the old man seated in the shadow? What is the role of ritual in the story?

7. How does the attitude of the older waiter appear to change in the course of the story? Point out
specific details.

8. As the old man leaves, Hemingway writes, “The waiter watched him go down the street, a very old
man walking unsteadily but with dignity.” What is the importance of this description?

9. As his young colleague prepares to go home, the older waiter remarks, “We are of two different
kinds.” Referring to the second question, how and why has their relationship changed?

10. “This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there
are shadows of the leaves.” What does the reiteration of the story’s title-theme-image signify?
Trace the light and shadow (chiaroscuro) motif as it evolves through the story.

APLaC
Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

11. “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. It was only and that and light was all it needed and a certain
cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y
nada y pues nada. Our nada who are in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada
in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nada
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 effect does the older waiter’s seemingly blasphemous conversation with himself have? Why
does he smile in front of the bodega’s coffee machine?

12. Finally, the older waiter “without thinking further” reluctantly resigns himself to another hopeless
return to his room: “He would lie in the bed, and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep.”
Has Hemingway succeeded in reversing his characters? Who is actually worse off at the end of
the story?

13. “After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.” How do you
react to the ending? What is the “insomnia” that “many must have”?

14. As you go back over the story, does your initial impression change?

APLaC
Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

You don’t need to do anything with these quotes; they are just some quotes that go with the reading and
may give you a jumping off point for some writing of your own.

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time. I believe that
basically you write for two people: yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then
wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read it or not and whether she is alive or
dead.

~Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters

As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.

~Proverb

Every deed and every relationship is surrounded by an atmosphere of silence. Friendship needs no
words—it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.

~Dag Hammarskjöld, Makings

Writing, at is best is a lonely life….The writer does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer
he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

Often when I dream, thoughts pass through my mind like cowled shadows, silent and remote, and
disappear. Perhaps they are the ghosts of thoughts that once inhabited the mind of an ancestor. At other
times the things I have learned and the things I have been taught drop away, as the lizard sheds its skin,
and I see my soul as God sees it. There are also rare and beautiful moments when I see and hear in
Dreamland. What if in my waking hours a sound should ring through the silent halls of hearing? What if
a ray of light should flash through the darkened chambers of my soul? What would happen, many and
many a time I ask. Would the bow-string tension of life snap? Would the heart, overweighted with
sudden joy, stop beating for very excess of happiness?

~Helen Keller, diary excerpt