A Clean Well-Lighted Place Mood

“...[E]veryone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light”(A Clean, Well-Lighted Place 1). Hemingway’s approach to the story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”, was both intricate and simplistic. This unique approach to the story forges a specific mood exclusive to the story. The mood conveyed by the story is a melancholic mood for the old man because the young waiter wants to go home and believes that his life is more meaningful than that of the old man’s when he stated that an hour was “more [important] to [him] than to [the old man]” (Hemingway 3). This mood contributes to the story’s meaning of contrasting light and dark, old and young, and how the old and young generations do not understand each other’s rationales.
The diction of the story is both intricate and simplistic, containing pieces of Spanish dialect and discernible English. Hemingway utilized Spanish words such as nada when the old waiter was describing the young waiter’s feelings towards the cafe saying “[s]ome lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was [sic] nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada” (Hemingway 4). The use of the Spanish words forces

The result of this is that the reader does not get any background information about the characters, because the information is not required to understanding “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”. Lastly, the tone is casual, with the young waiter having a distant and restrained tone, while the old man had an intimate and impassioned tone. The young waiter’s arrogant, presumptuous tone of believing his time is more important than the old man’s time, having the audacity to tell the old man that “[he] should have killed [himself] last week,” and undoubtedly assuming that being “[a]n old man is a nasty thing,” praising the younger generation by indirectly providing them with a