hemingway "a well lighted place" Essay

Hemingway: Ironically Nothing
What is to know about Ernest Miller Hemingway? He was a literary artist who won the Nobel Prize in 1954 (Baym 1847). When he was older he had health problems chiefly due to large amounts of consumed alcohol (Baker 556). According to Nina Baym, “an eye problem barred him from the army, so he joined the ambulance corps” (1846). Towards the end of his life, he was in two plane crashes in Africa, which caused both physical and mental damage to the writer (Baym 1847). He threatened his wife Mary twice with suicide and actually committed the treacherous act in the spring of 1961 (Baker 561,564).   We can see that he had a complicated, dangerous, and interesting life. In his famous short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” Hemingway shows much of his personal life developed within his characters. He also puts some of his own taste of life into the sentence structure of the story. Irony and reference to nothing show up in this short story that can be seen as relevant to his own life experiences.
As said earlier within this essay, Hemingway was rejected from the army due to an eye problem (Baym 1846). Carlos Baker also states that Ernest wrote to his son Bumby “that he was not in good shape and that his eyes were bothering him badly” (553). With this knowledge that Hemingway had eye troubles, we can see him characterized as the old drunken man in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”. “The old man liked to sit late because he was deaf” (Hemingway 176), even though the old man did not have eye troubles, he is still without a sensory organ. Hemingway was not completely without sight, yet he had much difficulty functioning day to day with the constant battle with the damage brought to them. Towards the end of his life Hemingway would sit in the comfort of his home quietly drinking a glass of wine (Baker 555), the old man in his story “liked to sit late” in “the shadow of the leaves of the tree that moved slightly in the wind” drinking brandy...