A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway — Review

The short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway doesn’t have a detailed description of the lives of the characters. There are only a few dialogues in the story, but the author leaves readers a place for imagination about the lives of the characters and their emotional state.

If the old man and the older waiter are definitely lonely, then the complete contrast to them is the young waiter hurrying home to his wife. The old man is not a drunkard, he is trying to drown his loneliness in alcohol.

Nevertheless, there is something that unites them: a place where it is clean and light. One possible interpretation of the moral of this story is: if the light in the soul is extinguished, then the person is involuntarily drawn to the place where it is light.

This is the link to the text of the story:
https://literaryfictions.com/fiction-1/a-clean-well-lighted-place/