Nick Knoke
9/24/10
Hemingway Essay
Try to imagine yourself when you are 80 years old. You don’t have a wife and you are deaf. It would be very lonely to only have a niece who checks in on you and the only place you go is a café to drink brandy all day. This is basically the life of the old man in the story “A Clean Well Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway shows a good understanding of depression and loneliness.
Hemingway connects the story “A Clean Well Lighted Place” to his own life because he never found love much like the old man in the story. Also the old man was depressed by this because he didn’t have anyone to love which is probably why he tried to commit suicide. There is definitely a connection between loneliness and depression because if you were lonely you would feel terrible and alone. If a person feels alone then they would feel like there isn’t a purpose for them and they kill themselves. This again ties back into Hemingway because he eventually kills himself too.
The reason the younger waiter doesn’t understand the old man at the café is because the younger waiter has a wife so he has a reason to go home every night where as the old man has no one to go home to so he likes to stay at the café for a long time. The older waiter understands the old man more because he is alone to. The reason the he also likes to stay at the café late is he is afraid that if he leaves then the people will not have a clean well lighted place to go to.
Hemingway definitely has a good understanding of loneliness having experienced it himself but he also has a very different way of describing it. Also he has a way of tying this story into his own life like him being depressed and lonely like the old man tries to commit suicide. This is strange because even though he didn’t know it at that time he would also commit suicide in the end of his life. This is also similar to the old man in the story because he doesn’t have a wife and Hemingway doesn’t ever truly find love.
Hemingway, being depressed and lonely, can understand and connect to the old man and his feelings. One of the reasons Hemingway was depressed was because he never found love but he also probably never did anything that he truly wanted to do except for his writing. His writing was the only thing he had to express himself and he always wrote about things that connected to his own life which might be why he was always unhappy. To stop yourself from being depressed and lonely live in the now and get everything out of life that you can.

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