A clean, well-lighted place

Describe the setting, why is the idea of a well-lighted place so significant to this story?

The story is set in a small town, somewhere in Spain. The entire scene of the story is set in a "clean well-lighted cafe". The idea of a clean well-lighted place is significant because it is similar to the old man, in the sense that it is quiet and lonely. The old-man goes there to be alone with his thoughts.


Why are the characters nameless?

The characters are nameless because the names don't really matter in the story. Ernest Hemingway dove right into the plot, and names would just be a distraction to the true essence of the story. If they would have had names, the story will most likely remain the same.



What is the connection between the old man and the older waiter? What is the purpose of the younger waiter in the story?


They are both very similar. The older waiter understands what the old man is going through, his loneliness and the fact that he finds the cafe a respectable place to be himself. He feels the same for others out there, that might need a place like his, to vent and to run away from the nothing they are afraid of, thats why he is in no rush to close. So that the others can enjoy the free spirited cafe. The old man as well as the waiter, find that the "deep, dark nothing" can go away in a place such as the clean well-lit cafe!

The purpose of the younger waiter is to represent more of a younger generation. He does not understand why the old man could be lonely, if he has all the money in the world. This shows his lack of maturity by expressing that money can make someone "complete". He is being selfish, and at the same time thinks the old man is being selfish for not taking him or the rest he needs into consideration. He is ignorant, and does not understand that his cafe and the other "bodegas" are totally different. Those bodegas are dark and dingy and the lowest kinds of people go there, for reasons extremely different than those of the old man.



What is the plot? Base it on the five points: Rising action, conflict, complications, climax, and falling action.

The main action of the story takes place in a cafe, in a small town in Spain. Two waiters are preparing to close but there is a deaf old man, practically drunk that does not want to leave.
The rising action is the whole dialogue between the two waiters, where they share their points of view regarding the situation. The conflict than begins when the younger server becomes inpatient and tries to stop serving alcohol to the old man. Complications arive when the old man remains in the cafe and continues drinking. The climax would be when the two servers have a difference of opinion. Lastly, the falling action is when the cafe is closed and the old man leaves and the older server goes to another "bodega" in search of some kind of company.



What is the theme? Tell me the theme in one sentence?

The theme is definately conflict between generations.


Biography of Ernest Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html


The very last years, 1960 and 1961, were marked by severe paranoia. He feared FBI agents would be after him if Cuba turned to the Russians, that the "Feds" (Burgess (9.), p. 110) would be checking his bank account, and that they wanted to arrest him for gross immorality and carrying alcohol. He got upset about perfectly normal photographs in his Dangerous Summer article. Hemingway was receiving treatment in Ketchum for high blood pressure and liver problems - and also shock therapy both for depression and his continued paranoia at FBI surveillance (The FBI, it turns out, were keeping tabs on Hemingway as a result of his period spent in Cuba). He attempted suicide in the spring of 1961, and received treatment again, but this was unable to prevent his suicide on July 2, 1961 - at 5:00am, he died as a result of a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head. He is interred in the Ketchum Cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho. In 1996, his granddaughter, actress Margaux Hemingway, would take her own life; she is interred in the same cementery.

http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Hemingway_Ernest.html