Somewhere the American writer Joan Didion expresses her admiration for Hemingway, and she calls attention especially to the opening of his second novel, A Farewell to Arms:
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
Her point related to the effects that can be achieved by the simplest English words strung together in perfect sequence, and how Hemingway's style, famous for its "simplicity," only pretends to be simple. The above passage, heavy with Anglo Saxon words of a single syllable, is nevertheless poetic and highly wrought--notice, for example, how the mountains of the first sentence give way to boulders and pebbles in the second and then, in the third, dust, which in the last sentence is repeated in a choric way, so that the sound this paragraph of English prose makes is: mountains, boulders, pebbles, dust, dust, dust.
The (very) short story called "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" begins:
It was late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the cafe knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.
If the buried texts were discovered in an archaeological dig, someone would surmise that the same person wrote these two distinctive paragraphs. They share the recurring forms of "dust" as well as "leaves of trees," and instead of beginning "In the late," like the novel, the story commences "It was late." It's late, most obviously, in a day. It's also late in the life of the old man who drinks. And the lateness of the day may suggest that it is late too in an era, the one in which the promises and consolations of Christianity sustain hope and organize life. The story comes to a kind of climax when one of the waiters recites a blasphemous version of the Lord's Prayer, the blasphemy arising from his substitution of nada, the Spanish word for "nothing," in the place of almost every noun: Our nada, who art in nada, nada by thy name, &c.
Four characters appear on stage, so to speak, in the story--the old drinker, two waiters, and a barman. We do not learn anyone's name. Hardly anything happens: the old man drinks, the waiters talk, the old man gets shooed away so that the café can be closed, one waiter heads home and the other walks to a bar that's still open, [the end]. The place usually reserved for character and action is filled with what might be called "atmosphere," which arises mainly from the associations of "lateness" and the nothing, nothing, nothing. The first paragraph of exposition is followed by a stretch of dialogue between the waiters:
"Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said.
"Why?"
"He was in despair."
"What about?"
"Nothing."
"How do you know it was nothing?"
"He has plenty of money."
First the lateness, then the nothing--and the topics of despair and suicide, augmented with a bitter joke. I said that the atmosphere takes the place of character but that isn't wholly true. In this first exchange, the waiters aren't differentiated: if it were a play, the speakers could be designated "one waiter" (as the first speaker in fact is) and "another waiter." But as they talk it's revealed how different they are. The younger one is married and annoyed by the old drinker whose tarrying keeps him from going home to his wife and bed. The older one is unmarried (possibly widowed), sympathetic and solicitous toward the old drinker, makes bitter jokes, and is unhurried because he has nowhere in particular to go after the cafe closes and suffers anyway from insomnia. Of course he is the one who will recite his own version of the Lord's Prayer as he walks to the bar after his colleague has chased out the old man and the cafe is shuttered for the night. In retrospect, it's clear that, in the opening bit of dialogue, he's the one who speaks first, knows of the old man's attempted suicide, gives "nothing" as the reason for it, and makes the joke about money to which the younger man makes no reply (maybe because he can't imagine why someone with plenty of money would be in despair--in other words, he takes it as a straight answer, not a bitter joke).
It's clear that the old drinker and the older of the two waiters are the objects of the author's keen interest and regard. For example, the older waiter reprimands the younger one, who has just shooed the old drinker:
"I am of those who like to stay late at the café," the older waiter said. "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."
This is highly rhetorical--it sounds more like the King James Version of the Bible than a waiter closing up at night--and may be explained as Hemingway's attempt to achieve an elevated effect by pretending to translate the waiter's Spanish into English. But the translation aspect is just a ruse to maintain plausible verisimilitude. The author's purpose is really just the elevation, which functions as a kind of italics. The speech is a Declaration of Sympathy, a credo that is soon amplified when, walking to the bar after the café is closed, the old waiter thinks to himself:
What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it . . . .
Like the younger waiter. The older men, robbed of youth's delusions, feel the weight of the lateness and the nothing. The story's effect derives from the way the subdued, placid surface covers desperation: it's an unscreamed scream.
But it would be wrong to regard the story as an expression of nihilism. Implicit in some of the details is the idea that while the game can't be won it should still be played the right way. There is something to put up against the nada--pleasant night cafés, brandy, light, order, fellow-feeling among sufferers, correct behavior. When the old drinker and would-be suicide is chased from the well-lit café by the younger waiter, he does not fail, though drunk, to count up the empty saucers stacked before him so that he can then count out of his coin purse the money necessary to pay his bill, including a tip. We are then told:
The waiter watched him go down the street, a very old man walking unsteadily but with dignity.
"The waiter" who watches and registers "unsteadily but with dignity" has to be the older one.