A thoughtful response to Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place".

Ernest Hemingway tells a story about the difference between an old man and a young man's perspective on life in "A Clean Well-Lighted Place." In this story, the younger waiter, impatient and confident, does not understand the old man who has come to the café to drink away his loneliness and fear. The younger waiter is unbelievably negative in everything he says and selfish in everything he does, always in one way …

…go to sleep"(190), telling himself it's only insomnia, but it could be the fear of loneliness. The three men differ greatly and yet they are all the same. The younger waiter will turn into that old man, but he is too blind to see it. The older waiter is even closer to being that old man and the old man may have even been like these two men at both ages, in his younger days.