Feedback:  the foil system in Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"

The question was:  Show how the theme of Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"comes into focus if we trace out the implications of the foil system the story is constructed around.  (You should focus mostly on the contrast between the old and the young waiter, but you should also comment on the contrast between the cafe the old waiter seeks to maintain and the bar he goes to before going home.)

What's at stake in the question

You want to show here that you know how the story indicates that it's built on a foil system, and that you know what to do with one when you realize it's at work -- i.e.,

1. to look for some counterpart contrasting fact or feature of X for every fact or feature that stands out about Y, and vice versa, and
2. to treat the more explicit and immediately evident contrasts as an invitation to explore possible implicit contrasts of possible thematic relevance.

The main overt features of the two waiters are that

• one is younger and the other is older;
• the former is impatient to close up and leave, and therefore rude to the old man who is still sitting in the cafe, drinking brandy; the the latter is sympathetic to the old man, and reluctant to close the cafe.
• These contrasting attitudes towards the same objects or situations (the old customer and the question of when to close up shop) show up in the contrasting style of speech of the two men -- their diction, grammar, tone. 
  • The younger waiter is more intensely expressive of his emotions, and these are all modes of anger, resentment, grievance.  To the old man he is brusque, speaking (as the narrator points out) "with that omission of syntax stupid people employ when talking to drunken people or foreigners."  Towards the older waiter we sense a touch of exasperation and complaint at the latter's disagreement. 
  • For his part, the older waiter speaks slowly, deliberately, gently -- sticking to his guns in trying to get his younger colleague to look at things differently, but always with self-possession, and with an air of reflection, and with resignation when it becomes clear that his counterpart is not open to change.
• There is also a contrast between the older waiter's meticulous concern for cleanliness and order, and the younger waiter's occasional messiness.  (A similar contrast emerges at the story's end, between the older waiter, now standing at a tavern where he's stopped on his way home, and the bartender, who resents his hint that the bar could stand polishing.)

But these overt contrasts (with which the story confronts us in the first instance) are designed to move us to infer the contrasting assumptions and values that "underlie" and make sense of them.  This story's plot indicates where we are to look for direction in doing this.

During the first two-thirds or so of the story, the two waiters are presented pretty much in parallel.  The narrative point of view is non-participant (third-person) objective:  we see and hear both waiters' behavior and speech "from the outside."  Moreover, each waiter gets about the same narrative attention.  But when the cafe closes and the two part company, the story accompanies only one further, and the narration shifts to afford an internal view of the his thoughts and feelings as he continues the conversation with himself.  The action presented for our inspection now becomes his struggle for self-clarification -- trying to understand why it was that it was so important for him to keep the cafe open.  From here to the conclusion, the narration persists in access to this character's inner experience (though when he arrives at the bar, the point of view shifts from interior monologue to limited omniscience).  Thus does the story's structure indicate that only one of the two foil figures is the protagonist.  As with any foil system, a deeper understanding of one pole can increase our understading of the other; but in this case the younger waiter is functioning as a subordinate character, to point up our understanding (and prompt our evaluation) of what is going on with the older waiter.  And the most immediate path of access to this is the passage the author casts in the role of the story's epiphany.

Key tasks to undertake in addressing this topic are thus sooner or later

(1) to explicate the meaning of that passage in terms of the key assumptions and values it reveals on the part of the older waiter;

(2) to indicate how it these assumptions and values "piece out" against counterpart assumptions and values we can plausibly infer to be at work in the character of the younger waiter;

(3) to show how this contrast invites us to identify with at least the values (if not the assumptions) of the older waiter, and to condescend towards the younger.  One character in the story's foil system sees something important to which the other is blind.  By the end of your answer, it should be clear to your reader what you think this is.

A sample answer to the question

Here is what Jeff Skirvin wrote.

The foil system in this story enables Hemingway to point up certain character traits without explicitly describing what they are or spelling out what their significance is.   It allows the reader to infer what these are in order to understand what Hemingway's point is.

The story contrasts the old and young waiters.  Hemingway uses three situations to get across a basic underlying point.  The first istuation is when both waiters observe a soldier who has picked up a prostitute.  The older waiter shows concern that he will get picked up by the guard for staying out after curfew.  The younger remarks that it doesn't matter so long as he gets what he's after.  The second situation is when the waiter's discuss the old deaf man's attempt at suicide.  Once again, the old waiter reacts with concern.  The younger waiter says he wishes the old man had succeeded, and so wouldn't be holding him up from going home.  The third situation is when the younger waiter went to refill the old man's glass with brandy:  he sloppily pours it in, grouses, and remarks to his companion that an old man is a nasty thing.  The older man protests that this old man is clean, and even when drunk does not spill his liquor.  What Hemingway is drawing attention to, through these contrasts, is the theme of dignity.  As we learn later on, the older waiter believes that there is no life after death, and for him the only comfort in one's life is the preservation of one's own dignity.

Hemingway also uses a foil system in contrasting the cafe with the bar.  The cafe was clean and well-lighted.  The bar is dark and dirty (1).  The older waiter believed that, since there is nothing after death, the human race is left in the dark.  The typical bar is a reminder of that, whereas the clean, well-lighted cafe that he tries to keep is a place for people who feel as he does can come and reflect upon that, find comfort in composing themselves and conducting themselves with dignity.  The bar here is dirty, and dust is associated ("ashes to ashes and dust to dust") with death. (2)

Note 1:  Actually here we get the story's facts wrong.  The contrast is a little more complicated, but it is along the lines that Jeff is indicating.  In his interior monologue, the older waiter had thought of bars, and of their unsuitability, for the meeting the sort of need he is concerned with, of their general darkness, dirtiness, and noise.  The bar he drops into on his way home turns out to be a cut above this -- he appreciates its gleaming coffee machine, and the fact that the lights are "bright and cheerful" -- but the effect is spoiled because the bar needs polishing, and the barman is careless of the fact.  This exchange serves to emphasize how seriously important cleanliness and order are, for the older waiter, in making humanly bearable (for those aware of it) the surrounding "din and darkness" (the meaninglessness of the physical cosmos, which is all that human life, in his view, is surrounded by). <--LB>   Return.

Note 2:  What has been said is certainly sufficient to earn full credit on the exam.  A useful enhancement would be to conclude the essay by adding a single sentence, in a separate paragraph, that makes an unifyingl point that hasn't already been explicitly stated.  Here are a couple of formulations that might perform that useful function.

• Hemingway seems to be suggesting that people like the young waiter themselves represent an intrusion into human life of the carelessness and indifference of the inhuman cosmos.   (Interestingly, this would be so whatever might be their conscious religious convictions, or lack of them.)
• The older waiter wins our admiration because he would simply rather be a caring person, in spite of the fact that it makes no "ultimate" difference whether we are like he chooses to be or like his younger co-worker so far is.   Here the final touch would be a reminder about what is striking about the character (in the ethical sense of the term) of the older waiter.
• The little cafe is an artificial stay against the ultimately overwhelming implications of nature.  In this it is not only a result of but like the resolve of the older waiter to assuage suffering in the face of incomprehension and unconcern on the part of what may be a great majority of others.  (You may note that this is a way of pointing out that the cafe stands for the old waiter in both an indexical and an iconic way.  It is a figurative object (a symbol) rather than a figure of speech, but it functions in a way parallel to both metonymy and metaphor.  It is both a result of his decision and an analogue to his character, which is itself a construct, something he makes, out of decision, choice, even though it makes no difference in any ultimate sense.)    <--LB>

Let's remind ourselves once again that to get at what the foil system in this story is fundamentally pointing at, you'll have to explore at least some of the implications of the key passage that clarifies the basic assumptions and values of the old waiter.  It is these ideas that satifies the curiosity that the more immediately evident elements of the foil system -- the older waiter's empathy vs. the younger waiter's self-centeredness, the older waiter's concern with cleanness and order, the younger waiter's carelessness and sloppiness in his work -- are designed to raise.  Why, these more open points of contrast prompt us to ask our selves, are cleanness, order, quiet, light, so important to the old waiter?  That's a puzzle to him, to, and getting to the bottom of it is what he's engaged in when the story's point of view shifts to interior monologue, to let us in on his continuation of the dialogue with the younger waiter. 

When the older waiter achieves clarity about his motivation, the reader's curiosity is satisfied, and the ideas that afford us this gratification thus jump into the spotlight.  (That is, the experience of gratification we undergo in the epiphantic moment imparts emphasis to what it is that satisfies our curiosity.)  For the old waiter, the pervasiveness of nada is a universal fact, so that there are two basic sorts of people:  "Some lived in it and never felt it, but he knew it was all nada y pues nada...."  The culmination of the foil system in this story is thus that the two waiters represent these two basic sorts of people:  the younger waiter is unaware of his true situation (the general human condition), whereas that older waiter understands it.  This accounts for the fact that, in their earlier conflict of opinion, the younger waiter was impatient with the older waiter, but the older waiter was patient with the younger.

So, if we are to show we grasp the point of the foil system in this story, we are eventually somewhere going to have something to say about what the old waiter means by "nothing."

  Suggestions, comments and questions are welcome.  Please send them to lyman@ksu.edu .

      Sample answer copyright © 2000 by Jeff Skirvin.  All other contents copyright © 2000 by Lyman A. Baker. 

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      This page last updated 02 May 2000.