Chapter III Analysis of the Older Waiter’s Nihilism
Compared with the naive younger waiter and the weary old man, the older waiter is in his middle age and he penetrates the uneasy nothingness of life. He understands the old man’s needing of a clean and well lighted place and relates the old man as his future. So he is willing to provide the cafe for those who need a refuge to escape from the chaotic world. He also lives in the great nada, but he chooses to face and fight it bravely, which makes him different from other characters in the story.
A. The Older Waiter’s Understandings of Nada
While the younger waiter and the old man in A Clean, Well-lighted Place are representatives of two extremes on the existential values, the older waiter is more objective and active. The older waiter is kind of like the old man who likes to stay late in the cafe. He understands why they both are reluctant to go home at night. When the younger waiter said “he can buy a bottle and drink at home”, the older waiter replied that “it’s not the same”, and “he stays up because he likes it”. And he tries to explain to the younger waiter why “bodegas” are different from the cafe,
“You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant cafe. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves.”17
But the younger waiter does not understand this.
“The older waiter and the younger waiter are in opposition. They stand (by knowledge, temperament, experience and insight) on either side of the great fences which exist in the world for the purpose of dividing sheep from goats. the younger waiter would like to go home to bed, and is impatient with the old drinker of brandy. The older waiter, on the other hand, knows very well why the old patron comes often, gets drunk, stays late and leaves only when he must.”18
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The younger waiter says that the old man is lonely while he is not, because he has a wife, a job, youth and so-called confidence. As a matter of fact, both the old man and the older waiter are lonely. The old man lives alone and the only one to take care of him is his niece who cut him down the rope. His wife is dead and he can’t find his meaning of his existence. Desperate and despaired, he tries different ways to escape from the emptiness of life. He gets drunk every night in the cafe. The older waiter, too, is lonely. He recognizes himself as one of those who like to stay out late at night and don’t want to go home. The readers can imagine that the older waiter also lives alone and has nobody to accompany or take care of him. He does not want to go home maybe because what awaits him at home is nothing but cold, loneliness and insomnia.
The older waiter is fully aware that he no longer has youth and confidence and he knows that there may be one day when he becomes like the old man---unwanted, alone, and in despair. When the younger waiter criticizes the old man, he defends the old man, pointing out that a wife may do good to the old man and that the old man is clean and neat even though he is drunk. The older waiter’s sympathy for the old man and his insight of nada make him different from the younger waiter. The older waiter tells the younger one that “an hour is the same”, but receives a reply, “you talk like an old man yourself”. The younger waiter is so young, inexperienced and superficial that he does not understand why the older waiter likes to keep the old man in and the cafe open in such a late time at night.
For the old man and the older waiter, a cafe is clean and pleasant and it is well lighted while a bodega is a different thing. It may be overcrowded, noisy and people cannot find peace and tranquility. So, the older waiter is also in need of a clean and well lighted place, which should be clean and pleasant, without music. Music may make the place noisy and boisterous, which will destroy the atmosphere of a clean, well lighted place.
The older waiter does not like to close up the cafe because he thins there may be some one who needs the cafe. When he stops at a bar on his way home, he orders a drink named “nada”. But to provide a comfortable, peaceful place for humans’ interior
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world, the crowded, noisy bar just won’t do. He leaves the bar and goes home to his room, knowing that “he would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia.”19 And this shows that he is used to insomnia.
He penetrates the nothingness (nada) in life, which makes him uneasy. But he tries to find himself the value of living through helping others by providing a clean, well lighted place.
B. The Active Attitude of the Older Waiter towards Nada
In this short story, Hemingway states that life is meaningless and man is insignificant in the great sea of nada. When the two waiters talk about the reason for the old man’s suicide, the younger waiter thinks it is about “nothing” because “he (the old man) has plenty of money”, while the older waiter views this from a different perspective. Baker Carlos pointed out that,
“for the old waiter, the word nothing (nada) contains huge actuality. The great skills displayed in the story is the development, through the most carefully controlled understatement, of the younger waiter’s mere nothing into the older waiter’s Something---a Something called Nothing which is so huge, terrible, overbearing, inevitable and omnipresent that, once experienced, it can never be forgotten.”20
It is not fear or dread that makes people fear. The older waiter stated clearly that “It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too”21. During and after war, the value of human life is belittled, thousands of lives died for the avaricious government who only wants to share the fruit of soldiers’ fighting. The government does not care about the loss of human lives in the battlefield. Now people pursue after materialism, lost their faith in God, religion, and have a wasted mind.
What leaves a deep impression on the readers is the prayer into which the older
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waiter’s prayer about nada:
“Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”22
While the original prayer in the New Testament is:
“Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, As it is in heaven.
Give us our day our daily bread,
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors, And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil:
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.”23
The original words, such as “Father”, “heaven”, “earth”, “bread”, “temptation”, “glory”, are replaced by the Spanish word “nada”, which shows the mockery that modern people makes at God and religion.
Here, the older waiter parodies the prayer in the New Testament, turning to religion for help to counter with the great nada in life. This prayer indicates that everything in the world is nothing, nada. But he still has insomnia when he gets home, and assumes that insomnia is everyone’s problem. Even the capable Lord can’t deliver him from nada and give him inner comfort and peace, which indicates his dissatisfaction and disappointment at religion and reality. Engels once said that “any
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religious teachings are not sufficient to support a staggering society”. The older waiter’s prayer about “nada” implies the author’s blasphemy at religion from the point of a nihilist.
Living in a world where nearly all others are pursuing material success, the ones who have a clear mind need to believe a certain teaching to help find their inner peace. What the older waiter relies on living is the light in the cafe. Even though it is artificial, it can drive out the darkness; it can’t provide light forever, but the longer it lights, the more it will release the feeling of loneliness and maintain people’s dignity. But a clean and well lighted place is not easy to find. In the end of the story, the older waiter is again disappointed and feels lonely because of the barman who does not understands him. “Nada” becomes journey and destination of life; human being’s living is called life, not the same as the animals’ surviving, needs a certain kind of creation: to create people’s living conditions for oneself and others.
The older waiter chooses to fight against nada, the nothingness in life, reflecting Hemingway’s famous line in The Old Man and The Sea: a man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated. In the story, Santiago goes out sea to fish. He only catches one fish in eighty-four days. But the marlin comes to rob him. He fights against the marlin and finally wins, but when he gets home, the only thing that left is the skeleton of his capture. Like Santiago, the older waiter’s understanding others and providing a clean and well lighted place for others can not change the environment he lives in. The readers can’t help asking if it is worthy of all these sufferings? Hemingway’s answer is that in fighting against nada, one don’t need to ask whether it is worthwhile or not. Though human life is nada, the only way out is to fight till to the end.
There are no great heroes in fighting against nada, but a real warrior who faces nada directly will win respect from others. It is during the fighting that people find their own value of living. The older waiter is such a hero in a peaceful war against nada like Santiago. His fighting provides a peaceful place for those who need a refuge for their souls.
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