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Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

=== Notes ===

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 Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.
+Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.
 === Notes ===