Ernest Hemingway's A Clean Well-Lighted Place

Hemingway’s “A Clean Well- Lighted Place” was a short story about two waiters discussing the attempted suicide of an old man, who regularly comes to the bar. After reading over once, the story seems to have no direction or point. The story seems to just be random and just telling about how a man tried to kill himself. When read again, and more meticulously, an underlying meaning and other information can be found in the story. The meaning and information however can only be found by techniques or themes put into the story by the author himself. In “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”, the underlying message can be discovered through dialogue and the reoccurring theme of nada.
First, Hemingway uses a strange technique of dialogue throughout his story which helps carry out his main points and also adds a sense of mystery in his writing. Readers can recognize that there seems to be a problem when it comes to assigning characters with their appropriate line. Hemingway intentionally leaves out indication on who says what, which gives the story that sense of mystery referenced earlier. According to Kroeger, an insoluble problem occurs based on what each character knows. One speaker may seem to know the details, while the other speaker does not, but in a different instance the situation feels reversed
In the writing of Hemingway, the term nada has a double meaning. The first being the English translation of the Spanish word nada which means “nothing.” The second being that nada implies that one who experiences nada does not need to search for the meaning of existence any longer (Stock 54). The first connotation is a straight forward definition, whereas the second connotation suggests that when someone finds nada they would not need an explanation as to why people are alive. According to Kroeger, Hemingway also uses the word nada to define chaos (241). With nada comes disaster destruction and