The Painted Door Setting

The Setting in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” and “The Painted Door” The setting can reveal a lot of things on the characters as well as the story. It often contains hidden meanings. In the short stories, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” and “The Painted Door” the setting is key to understanding how the characters evolved. Solitude pushes the protagonist in Hemingway and the one in Ross’ story on the edge of sanity. The void of being alone will eventually drive them mad and it will prompt them to do something irrational. The consequences of their actions will gravely affected their mental health. The protagonists desperately want to brighten their life in order to break the grim hold of loneliness. In “The Painted Door”, Ann’s husband often leaves her alone in the house while he
She coats the door over and over even if the paint never fully dries. This repeated action represents her desperate attempt at finding something to do in order to forget her loneliness. The color white of the door represents her struggle to add a bit of light to counter the darkness that is invading her life. Ann also seeks warmth to shield from the storm outside. She keeps feeding the fire to make sure it never dies. As she says: “there is plenty of wood to keep me[Ann] warm,” (Sinclair, 309) it is clear that she does not want to run out of wood. During this part of the story, the cold is her enemy. It only makes her feel more miserable and alone. Similarly, in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”, the old man stays very late in a well-lit café because he is in quest of light and comfort. At the café, he remains on the terrace in “the shadow of the leaves” (Hemingway, 297). The café is open so the old man feels at ease there instead of being in his house where he feels trapped by the walls alone and deaf. Having no one left, he knows loneliness too well to want to return to its side. One can wonder why he does not go inside the café if light is what he