A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
Writing Assignment 5 Modernism and Postmodernism have both dealt with idea and nature of “nothing.” However, they do so in different ways.
In Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” both the old man and a waiter deal consider “nothing” to be a threat, something to avoid and seek sanctuary from. This is shown when the waiter speaks to himself about what exactly he seeks: “What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too” (291). The waiter is experiencing an existential crisis as he finishing his night’s work, and he claims that everything is “nothing”—including “a man.” Modernism’s take on “nothing” is frightening and unknown. It is something that people …show more content…
Hulga, holds a doctorate in philosophy in “Good Country People,” and from a young age, she believed that Nothing can be studied, yet understood as nothing, as her text book explains:
Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing—how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing. (448-49).
O’Conner take on the academic subject of Nothing is paradoxical. By seeking nothing from Nothing, scientists better understand the characteristics of Nothing, which is nothing. This contradictory seed of an idea carries through Hulga’s life, causing her to passively not believe in anything. Based on these two examples, one can see that Modernism focuses on the existential question of “nothing,” while Postmodernism focus on the paradoxical, and almost comical idea that we can attempt to understand
In Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” both the old man and a waiter deal consider “nothing” to be a threat, something to avoid and seek sanctuary from. This is shown when the waiter speaks to himself about what exactly he seeks: “What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too” (291). The waiter is experiencing an existential crisis as he finishing his night’s work, and he claims that everything is “nothing”—including “a man.” Modernism’s take on “nothing” is frightening and unknown. It is something that people …show more content…
Hulga, holds a doctorate in philosophy in “Good Country People,” and from a young age, she believed that Nothing can be studied, yet understood as nothing, as her text book explains:
Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing—how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing. (448-49).
O’Conner take on the academic subject of Nothing is paradoxical. By seeking nothing from Nothing, scientists better understand the characteristics of Nothing, which is nothing. This contradictory seed of an idea carries through Hulga’s life, causing her to passively not believe in anything. Based on these two examples, one can see that Modernism focuses on the existential question of “nothing,” while Postmodernism focus on the paradoxical, and almost comical idea that we can attempt to understand