An Existential Reading of A Clean Well-Lighted Place

Ernest Hemingway has been compared and affiliated, by different critics, as relating to various traditions of American and European writing. As for the American tradition of fiction writing, he is, by and large, affined to the line of Edgar Allen Poe; in that both writers strive for a unified aesthetic effect, and not with Hawthorne whose authorial voice seems to be felt in the delineation of his subject matter. In Hemingway’s case, however, this stylistic feature unfolds the existential overtones of his work and reveals to us the overarching philosophy of life which he wished to expound through a dozen of novels and three collections of short stories. He has also been compared to James Joyce. Although Joyce’s epiphanic moments are not precisely reflected in Hemingway’s writings, the clarity with which Hemingway describes events and the unity of temporal and permanent experience which he advocates through these descriptions are, in essence, equivalent to the aesthetics of Joyce’s epiphanies. The short story A Clean Well-Lighted Place is one of the instances which manifests in one single piece the best of Hemingway’s practice of form and content. It is, as attested by most readers and critics, a typical Hemingwayesque story both in the structure of its prose as well as in the theme it represents. Hemingway’s spare and plain diction, his stripped down sentences, his understated observation, and above all his use of irony match the preeminent existential theme which has overshadowed the text. This paper tries to bring together an analysis of the characterization as well as the style of Hemingway in an existential reading of the short story A Clean Well-Lighted Place .