Attempt a comparative reading of ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’ and ‘The Bear’. 

A Clean Well-Lighted Place” and William Faulkner’s “The Bear” are two different kinds of stories. The former deals with the terrible fate of an old man, is completed within the duration of a few hours and the space of less than 4 pages: the latter treats the ‘growing up’ of an adolescent, Ike, spans over more than 10 years and runs into over a 100 pages. The former uses sparse narrative, bits of dialogue, and very few characters; the latter is written in a spontaneous flow of rhetorical narrative and reveals almost a panoramic range of characters. Nothing much happens in the former story; but a great deal of action takes place in the latter.

Thematically “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” unfolds the despairing predicament of an old man of eighty, bereft of wife and children, almost deaf, unsteady on feet who attempted to commit suicide the previous week. “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” seems to be a very simple, unemotional, and almost unfinished short story.

 However, when readers look for deeper insight, they can find how meaningful this story is. The author's diction gradually brings the readers to a higher level of understanding the reality of life. The truth is buried underneath the story the emotional darkness, eventual isolation, and existential depression caused by the nada, the nothingness.  He is the lone, last customer at a clean well-lighted café nowhere he stays and drinks until the waiters pull down the shutters. His deprivation, infirmity, handicaps and loneliness are all manifested in the stark nothingness he is now confronted with, which, as Carlos Baker defines, is “something called Nothing which is so huge, terrible, overbearing, inevitable, and64 omnipresent that, once experienced, it can never be forgotten.” In contrast to this dispiriting theme, “The Bear” is focused on the sombre but bracing ‘growing up’ of Comparisons Ike, descendent of the legendary Old Carothers, who, under the tutelage of Sam And Contrasts Fathers in the woods, acquires the hunting skills and the courage and compassion human beings are capable of. Like that of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” it address the lives of families whose pasts are ugly and disheveled. 

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