Analysis of a Clean Well Lit Place by Ernest

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Analysis of A Clean Well Lighted Place By Ernest Hemingway What makes a story, a story? Its exciting characters, setting, plot and theme of course! One interesting story I read was A Clean Well Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway. Basically what happens is that three men sit in a clean well-lit café. It is on a dark night just one week after one of the men, an old, deaf alcoholic, attempted to commit suicide. It is by a dusty street in a Spanish-speaking nation. The two other men are waiters who worked at the café. The waiters talk among themselves while the old man sips brandy. Finally the old man gets up and leaves, quickly followed by one of the waiters. The second waiter goes to a bar but dislikes it and then goes home. Wow! It’s impossible to imagine that with just pen and paper one can pump life into fictional characters and makes them real, but that is exactly what a good author does. The waiter who was in a hurry was youthful and confident. He had a wife at home and probably kids and his job at the café. He seems annoyed at the old man and thinks that people like him are better than people like the old man, while not understanding the reason for the old man’s despair. His view is that anyone who is financially stable can’t be miserable. The young waiter is confident with hopes and dreams for the future and doesn’t have a minute to waste to get to them. The old man is in complete depression. “He tried to kill himself last week”! On the other hand he has a lot of money and a niece who adores him; she was the one who saved him from death. I also derived that from the lines “This old man is clean. He drinks without spilling. Even now, drunk. Look at him” that he is well brought up. It is possible that he is lonely because he goes to the bar alone, he doesn’t have a wife, or a waiter he can easily talk to. The second waiter is the same way. He doesn’t
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