A Clean, Well Lighted Place

Mutia Mawaddah Rohmah

Gindho Rizano M.Hum

Prose I

October 18, 2011

The Theme of a Clean, Well Lighted Place

In this essay I will analyze short story from Ernest Hemingway, the title is A Clean, Well Lighted Place was published in 1926. Here we can find three persons; they are the old man, the older man and the young man on the café. From the title, we imagine a place is clean and well lighted, every people is searching this place. Maybe to get happiness, quietness, peacefulness or everything that can make our live to be meaningful. The themes that can I found here is solidarity as human (moral), and we must resist and solve our problem and also thrown away the despair in our life.

The first theme is solidarity. I got this theme from waiter’s characters, it conveyed from their conversation about the old man. He always comes to the café and stays until late night. From their conversation, we know that the older waiter have different thinking with younger waiter about the old man and especially about live. This story conveyed the older waiter understand with the old man situation in his life. The older man tries to make the younger waiter understand about the old man why he always stays here until late night because he likes it. Older waiter imagined this condition will happen in his experience later. And I think, the older waiter has a same feeling with the old man. We can conclude this statement from the last of story, “after all he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia” (Hemingway 24). Because of this, the older waiter really understands about the old man. But the older waiter’s characters different from the younger waiter’s characters. We can see from the younger waiter’s statement “You talk like an old man yourself. He can buy a bottle and drink at home” (Hemingway 23). From the first statement, we can know the older waiter afraid when this condition occurs to him, who is the other waiter want to serve him in the café.  The younger waiter is not sensitive to interpret this situation, only things about him and want to go home early. And the second statement, we know that the younger not care to old man. He thinks the old man can buy a bottle and drink at home. So the old man doesn’t disturb his time to go home .We also can understand the younger waiter’s character from this quote “He is lonely. I’m not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me” (Hemingway 22). From both of characters, we can believe when exist in social environment, pay attention to the others is became important part in society. Because the cycle of life always rotate, maybe one day we also need the other people to understand our problem.

The second theme is to resist the despair. When we were read this story, we will get a lesson why we need to resist the despair in our live. I got this theme from analyzed irony combine with symbol. The café as the symbol in this story representation about liveliness, happy, and do many activities here. But in this story the old man only represented about nothingness and loneliness in his live. The café and the old man have different reflection and this very ironic. But this story teaches as to resist the despair, the old man sitting on the café to stifle his felling not alone. In the beginning, the old man felt despair to her live, he has much money but he didn’t have happiness. He tried many ways to solve his problem and which one is to suicide to end this problem but be unsuccessful. But now he found the café to accompany himself. He sitting without friends, only companied with his brandy, saucer and glass. But when he stayed here, he felt not alone. With stay here, the old man got solution to resist her despair.

            The conclusion, we can get many educations especially about morality and how to fight our live. I think morality can teach us how we can to understand the thought and felling from the other people. So, we have solidarity each others. If we talk about how to fight our live, it’s very important because live will rotate. One day we can stand up in the good position but one day we can drop to the bad position.  Live is full with many problems. And we must get the solution to solve it. From this story we studied how to resist the despair, because I think every people have been felt it. We must stand up in the front to face it.

Works Cited

Klarer, Mario. An Introduction to Literary Studies. Landon and New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 1999. 114

Rizano, Gindo. Bahan Ajar Mata Kuliah Prose 1. Padang, 2010.

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” SparkNotes LLC. 2007. http://www.sparknotes.com/short-stories/a-clean-well-lighted-place/ (accessed October 9, 2011).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean,_Well-Lighted_Place