A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (Existentialism Theory)

Introduction

A Clean Well Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway The short story “A Clean Well Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway focuses on the existential crisis, the search for meaning that faces human beings. To truly get a deeper understanding of this story, one must have some knowledge about the author's life. Hemingway was married four times and won the Nobel Prize for literature. (Bennett, 70)

Discussion

Hemingway's theory proposes that life is naturally meaningless. This doesn't mean that life has to be meaningless, rather than one must find what the purpose of life is. One has to set standards for oneself and conform to them with dignity, thus not falling into despair. This theory can be found in this short story and throughout Hemingway's` writings. (Lewis, 302)

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is written in a style which in itself reflects the existentialist's metaphor for life, in that, it will be meaningless unless the reader is able to approach it intending to instill meaning within it. Through the characters of the younger waiter, the older waiter, and the old man, Hemingway illustrates three varying positions on an individual's perception of his life: deception, realization, and actualization. The reader weighs the antisocial nature of the existentialist against the vapidity of the non-existentialist, and is forced to question his own rationalization of life. Hemingway's characters and plot, sparse as they may seem, mirror reality so effectively that their message is clear; life is the responsibility of the individual, and until he is able to recognize this, no amount of insipid standards or dogmatism will be able to replace the insurmountable personalism lacking in his life. (Perloff, 184)

Existentialism takes a back seat to its offspring, postmodernism, and it is unfortunate that in the minds of most people, the “scientized” sophistry, sometimes frivolously so, and abstruse language that so characterizes contemporary postmodern literature is inevitably linked to existentialism as well. It may therefore be surprising that I, the author of a site dedicated to reason, identify strongly with some of the central tenets of existentialism. Irrational Man opens with a lament that one can easily sympathize with: professional philosophers, motivated by guilt of not being scientists and the desire to emulate the spectacular successes of the physical sciences, have become ever more specialized and academic, and in doing so lost sight of the total vision of man. So it was up to the non-professional philosophers ...