A Clean Well Lighted Place

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A Clean Well Lighted Place

        Ernest Hemingway is respected as a phenomenal writer. While I enjoyed A Clean Well-Lighted Place, I though it was a simple story. I made the mistake at taking it at face value. After all, I thought, short stories are just simple little tales about nothing, right? I was wrong. This short story told a deeper story. The deeper story didn’t really have a moral or any highly symbolic points. It didn’t even require very deep analysis. The deeper story just gave me a reason to be empathetic at times when it seems the least necessary.

        There are only three main characters in A Clean Well-Lighted Place. The old waiter, the young waiter and the old, blind patron. The patron is totally content sitting in the clean well-lighted place and drinking. He is simply being. By ‘being’, I mean that the patron is just being alive and appreciating and owning his life. It seems to be an almost melancholy state he’s in. The old, blind patron almost seems as though, if he were to stay there forever, he would be just fine. Although he does not speak much in the story, I would say that he is the protagonist.

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        The young waiter (also the antagonist in the story), wanted to get home to his family, is irritated with the patron. He wants this old man to just go home so he can close up shop. He is at the point in his life when things just seem to move too quickly and one never has enough time. He works at this place to make money. He doesn’t work there to provide some lonely old man, who tried to commit suicide, with a place to stay and get drunk. He decides to usher the old man out by refusing him ...

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