A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

The Modernist literary movement spanned from the early 1900s until the 1940s and impacted story structures, literary themes, and subject matters. The movement arose at a moment in history that was characterized by rapid change. Industrialization and capitalism were on the rise, and the authors sought to directly address the negative effects of this rapid growth. Additionally, due to the advancements in technology such as automobiles and airplanes, World War I was especially deadly. For the first time, widespread death and destruction became tangible to people back home through technology like radio and photography, which allowed for quick dissemination of news and images from the front lines.

With this, Modernist authors took on themes like confusion, isolation, and disillusionment. In adjusting to the rapidly changing modern world, many found that the constructs they once relied upon, such as religion, could no longer support their beliefs. After witnessing the harsh realities of the industrialized world and the despair and death of war, many people of the time felt a sense of disillusionment with their world. As a result, many experienced alienation as they struggled to grapple with their surroundings.

This sense of isolation and despair permeates “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place;” the old man has attempted suicide, and the older waiter relates to his desire to be out among others rather than alone at home. The two waiters, while coworkers, are estranged from each other, represented by the lack of names in the story. The early 20th-century nihilistic undertones make their way into the text in how the men face the world alone. They come to the café alone, and they leave it alone. Even when they are among others, they are ultimately alone, embodied in the repetition of “nada” and “nothing” toward the end of the text.

One way that Modernist authors worked with these themes was by rejecting traditional storytelling conventions and experimenting with the form itself. This experimentation took many forms, from Imagist and Realist poetry that centered vivid descriptions, to fractured, stream-of-consciousness writing that aimed to capture characters’ interiority and disconnected thought processes rather than straightforward narratives. Authors like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce became famous for their Impressionistic, non-linear novels using these techniques. Hemingway uses stream of consciousness in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” in its most intimate moments, like when the older waiter is discussing the nothingness, the nada. In these moments, the reader is taken inside the older waiter’s mind and sees the progression of his thoughts with no clear explanation.

Adding to the disorientation of the text, Hemingway also plays with a fractured sense of time. The text and the dialogue move fast, but the story covers a much longer period. For example, the old man is given an overly full glass of brandy, and just 25 lines of dialogue later, he is asking for another. This dialogue consists of short questions and answers, yet the dialogue must have taken place over an extended period for the man to have drunk his entire brandy. In this way, Hemingway plays with time, causing uncertainty and disorientation within the text.

While Hemingway uses these other Modernist techniques, he is most famous for his “Iceberg Theory” of writing. The visible part of an iceberg comprises a small part of the entire mass, with most of it hidden beneath the water, and the Iceberg Theory applies this principle to writing. Hemingway achieves this by writing short sentences, omitting excess words and descriptions, and prioritizing straightforward dialogue. These elements are used to evoke feelings and moods, and the reader fills in the gaps to complete the story.

In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” this sparse treatment also applies to the story’s structure. Rather than take the reader through a typical story arc including an inciting incident, rising action, conflict, and resolution, the story’s characters end just as they began, with no clearly identifiable external conflict. Similarly, Hemingway’s dialogue omits identifiable speaker tags, making his speakers, at least initially, indiscernible. The story at times becomes disorienting as the reader struggles to distinguish one character from the other, and this disorientation reflects the Modernist zeitgeist, in which people struggled to make sense of the new and modern world.