The Significance of Purpose in Life, analysis of "A Clean Well-lighted Place"

The Significance of Purpose in Life A life without purpose and belief is a life without meaning and hope. Solitary elderly people who believe that suffering and death are essentially arbitrary part of the world need a place of refuge from this terrible awareness that human lives are essentially meaningless. Hemingway, in his "A Clean Well-lighted Place," has skillfully expressed a philosophical implication in accordance with the denial of metaphysics. He portrays the characters in …

…Hemingway code is the "cultivation of the masculine virtues of courage, dignity, and stoic endurance" (Lodge 194). The code is something to which both the old man and the older waiter aspire, but "incompletely, unconfidently" (Lodge 196). Works Cited Hemingway, Ernest. "A Clean Well-lighted Place." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 8th ed. New York: Longman, 2002. 158-162. Lodge, David. The Novelist at the Crossroads. New York: Cornell UP, 1971.