living in a world where “all is vanity and vexation of spirit”. His physical impotence is a symbol of the spiritual impotence of modern man. Then his next important novel is A Farewell to Arms, in which Lieutenant Henry quited the war and went back to his wife, Catherine, with the hope to live a happy life. But his wife died in childbirth. This novel reflected the mood of the after war generation and brought Hemingway international fame. Other books, such as Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, and so on, reflected the spiritual conditions of that generation, and established him as the spokesman of the “Lost Generation” and one of the most influential modern American writers.
Hemingway wrote one hundred and nine short fictions, out of which fifty-five is marked as “published short stories”. Many critics agree in estimating Hemingway’s accomplishment, that “he wrote best earlier in his career, and his chief contributions were in the genre of short story”.2 He formed his own style, and had the schooling of Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, to list just a few. Ezra Pound once suggested to Hemingway that the whole art of writing was to be concise, or to say what you mean in the fewest and clearest words. In his latter years, Hemingway was called “Papa Hemingway” by others, which refers to his main contribution to the development of a new style of writing, to which Mark twain had contributed a lot, the colloquial style. It is agreed that Hemingway’s style is concise and natural style of his prose, but we should note that Hemingway’s style is deliberate and polished and that his language is of high suggestion and connotation and capable of having many different levels of meanings. His great achievement and contribution to the modern fiction was deftly expressed in his winning of Nobel Prize for “his powerful style-forming mastery of the art”.
Nihilism, coming from the Latin word nihil, or nothing, can be understood in several different levels, such as political nihilism, ethical nihilism, and existential nihilism. What is commonly used and interpreted of the word nihilism today is the sense of existential nihilism, which argues that human life is meaningless, without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Under such circumstances, existence itself, like actions, sufferings and feelings, is senseless and empty. Suicide is
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sometimes encouraged.
In philosophy, nihilism is first used by Friedrich H. Jacobi to negatively characterize transcendental idealism. Then Ivan Turgenev popularized the word “nihilism” in his novel Fathers and Sons to describe the obvious scientism espoused by the figure Bazarov that drums a creed of total negation in others. People usually associate nihilism with Friedrich Nietzsche, who perceives that there is no objective order or structure around the world except what people give to it. He wrote in his Will to Power that “the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking and why finds no answer”. Convinced of Nietzsche’s analysis, Oswald Spengler studied several cultures and confirmed that patterns of nihilism were indeed an obvious feature of the collapsing civilizations.
Existential Nihilism means that all the things around us is nihilistic except what we can perceive with our sensual organs, that is to say only what we experienced is the real and exists in the world. Existential nihilism has become part of the Western Intellectual tradition from the very beginning. Also, during the period of Renaissance, William Shakespeare wrote some lines near the end of Macbeth, and let Macbeth speak out his disgust for life:
“Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor plyer That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”3
These lines eloquently summarized the existential nihilists’ perspective. Existentialists, as a rule, do not believe in the presence of a God or higher power because they view this as an avoidance of accepting responsibility for one’s own actions. People who live in nihilism can not find a way out; nor can they find a way to reconcile to it. And all means to escape from nada are utterly failed. They can’t find
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their meaning of living, thus they feel desolated and desperate.
For nearly one hundred years, especially after his death, there are many researches concerning Hemingway and his works. Baker Carlos wrote a book called Hemingway: The Writer As Artist, which sketches Hemingway’s life and his achievements in literature. And there are writers who explored and wrote the biography of Hemingway, studying his life experience and his characteristics. Some researches focus on Hemingway’s writing style, his colloquial language, his Iceberg Technique, Hemingway Code Heroes, and his ideas towards life from his books. There are also many studies on A Clean, Well-lighted Place that concern symbolism, language, nihilism and meaning of living.
This thesis will analyze nihilism through the life experience and attitude of the three main characters: the two waiters and the old man. Then the author will induce Hemingway’s attitude towards the nothingness (nada) in life.
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Chapter I Analysis of the Young Waiter’s Nihilism
The younger waiter in the story is described as someone who has little sympathy for others. What he cares is whether he can get home early to his bed and his wife. So, when the old man stays in the cafe late in the night, he gets impatient and complains much. Then he cheats the old man out of the cafe. On the life journey, the younger waiter represents the youth and the inexperienced overviews on life. He knows nothing of nothingness and he even does not realize that he lives in nada.
A. The Background of the Young Waiter’s Growing
The young waiter in A Clean, Well-lighted Place is probably in his twenties or early thirties, when he has not experienced much in life and is kind of naive and shallow. So he sees things just from the surface and does not bother to go deep and explore the interior meaning. Most of his conceptions are formed in the 1920s in his teenage years (since the story is written in1933, the 1920s should be the young waiter’s teenage years). Since the 1920s is a special period of time sandwiched between two events of great historic importance, the First World War and the Great Depression, it is very important in one way or another. The United States of American participated in the First World War in 1917, seven months before it came to an end. During the first two or three years of the war, the Americans made large amounts of money by supplying ammunition and supplies to other powers involved in the war.
After the war ended, American got a lot richer as a whole and it seems in the Americans’ eyes that there was money everywhere. And there appeared an economic boom since there were many new industries booming. People are allowed to buy things on hire-purchase which enables people to buy things that they don’t have to pay in one go, but by paying for several times with interest. But hire-purchase is easy to make people get into debt without any real plans for the future. This made nearly all the goods affordable, even the factory workers and shoe-shining boys seemed to have a lot of money to spend. And people invest as much as they could in the stock
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market in Wall Street, hoping to make much more money. But in 1929, the Wall Street Crash took place and ended the illusionary era. As the Great Depression spread worldwide, it brought bloom and hardship everywhere. The great American writer Mark Twain wrote The Gilded Age to satirize the money-pursuing rocking twenties.
The 1920s is an age of industrialization and urbanization for the Americans. There are lots of inventions that make people’s life more convenient and easier. New industries emerged to cater for their needs, so there are more people engaged in new jobs. Also, the social tradition is changing. For example, the wearing of girls is much shorter. They take up smoking, drinking and dancing wildly. Fitzgerald called them “flappers” of the “Jazz Age” in one of his books. The society is also going through a series of changes and reform movements. There appear many different political parties and the Ku Klux Klan has done the most at racial persecution. The whole society is anarchy and in chaos.
Meanwhile, the loss of faith makes the condition even worse. With Darwin’s theories of evolution and the development of modern science, people find it hard to hold on to a belief, especially after the German philosopher’s declaring of the death of God. Without faith, men cannot pull their feelings and thoughts together. They feel the world they live in is chaotic, fragmented, and disjunctive. They live without feelings of security, hope and happiness. In a word, people find themselves living in a spiritual wasteland. T. S. Elliot wrote Waste Land which revealed the spiritual impotent of that generation. The 1920s is, as Malcolm Cowley put it, “not so much a historical period as a legend of glitter, of reckless, and of talent in such profusion that it was sown broadcast like wild oats.”
On such social conditions, the young ones grow up with a belief that life is to enjoy themselves, whether it is by heavy drinking, smoking, wild dancing, violence and drugs, or anything else. They no longer care about others, nor do they care about tomorrow. They live like the young people who often take part in parties whose host they do not know in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Some existentialists claim that God is dead. They have lost their belief, or that they don’t have beliefs. They just care for today and today’s pleasure. So is the young waiter in A Clean,
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