Is Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” a modernist text? “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway, first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1933. The story starts with an old deaf man sitting in a clean and well lighted cafe drinking brandy. Two waiters, one young and the other older, sit afar and share what they know about the man. One says that the old man tried to kill himself. When the other waiter asked the reason why, he was told that the old man was despairing over nothing and he even had a lot of money. Thus starts the short story which in less than 1500 words questions the human condition of loneliness, death and despair which are usually associated with modernism. Modernism is an art period which gained prominence after the First World War. It commented on the stresses and strains the society felt. The generation which had fought the war had their lives wrenched from the expected patterns and old values they understood. There were unexpected breaks in the traditional ways the people viewed and interacted with the world. There was an overall loss of belief in religion due to the indiscriminate and senseless killing nations indulged in the World War. More so, greater industrialisation and globalisation resulted in people feeling alienated and lonely as suddenly they saw the increased usage of machinery (which led to a decline in the use of manual labour) and rise in capitalism. The pre-Modernist world was characterized by its sense of order and stability which were rooted in religion, social values and a sense of identity whereas the Modernist world was characterized by chaos, changing beliefs about relationships between the sexes which led to scepticism, confusion and loss in faith. Hemingway wrote about the aimlessness that characterized many of the Americans of his generation who were disillusioned by the state of decay in society. He was also a part of the clique of writers called “The Lost Generation”- American writers who became synonymous with Modernism. Writers such as Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound chose to live abroad and struggled to find some meaning in the wake of turmoil. This was done by trying to record the workings of the conscience, that is, by looking inside oneself. Hemingway proceeded in this direction by “abandoning ornamental language”. His works are often characterised by having clean, simple, blunt language without much use of adjectives. He could also write so successfully in this style because of his journalism career which careened his writing into being concise and direct. He only provided information which he deemed to be wholly necessary. This spare language also represented the atmosphere of this era. “A Clean Well Lighted Place” has several of the aforementioned characteristics. Being a story set in the post World War and Depression era, its title with the use of “lighted” is a binary opposite to what the Great Depression and World War I stood for. With a reference to “clean” the title is commenting on the squalor and dirt which was common in the cities in the wake of widespread industrialisation. The story immediately begins with description of the clean, nondescript Spanish cafe which has been left unnamed. A deaf old man is seated at night in the cafe because “at night it was quiet and he felt the difference.” The old man could be seen as an allegory for the events that have passed and his deafness as a symbol of his separation from the world. Since the old man had lived through the insane bombings and missiles of the First World War, his deafness might have been caused due to the same. His deafness might also refer to the symbolic death of the Christian values one lived with before the war. The old man cannot any longer hear the dated traditions of Christianity and its principles and promises. The society which emerged after the unnecessary bloodshed of the World War led to disturbances in the traditional roles followed by both the genders. There was also increasing moral depravity which was no longer under the check of the church. As soldiers returned to the cities, women who “wore no head covering” (prostitute) became a norm and were often seen in public.