Ernest Hemingway comments during The Paris Review Interview that “the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all good writers have has I,” he meant that a good writer must be able to poses the knowledge to decipher between what the true light meaning is and be able to detect any untruthful events by radar. Writing itself is to be learned overtime, but the ability to recognize truth is at the root of storytelling and essential to a true writer, a story has to feel true. Hemingway believes that life has no higher purpose and that no higher being exists to help us make sense of it. Instead, humans are left alone to find meaning in the world and their lives.

Hemingway’s short story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place highlights his views. In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Hemingway suggests that life has no meaning and that man is an unimportant spot in a great sea of nothingness. The older waiter makes this idea as clear as he can when he says, “It was all a nothing and man was a nothing too” (Hemingway 145).

The main characters in the story are two waiters, one who is young married and in a hurry to end his shift, an older waiter who sees the café as refuge for despair and an old drunk deaf man who likes to drink at a well-lit café. The younger waiter is immature and says rude things to the old man because he wants to close the café early to go to bed. The young waiter says “he has no regard for those who must work” (Hemingway 144). He seems unaware that he won’t be young forever or that he may need a place to find solace later in life too. The older waiter tries to explain to the young waiter that some people have nothing to look forward to, so consider their needs and happiness. Everyone is different and someone’s “nothing” can be someone’s something to them. If it entails them to be at a café for long hours of the night, then so be it. In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” the older waiter sums up the despair that drives him and others to brightly lit cafés by saying simply, “It is a nothing.”  

Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernest. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. Pearson, 2012. 142-46. Print.