Clean Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Term Paper

When Othello marries the white Desdemona, he presses his luck, and the tide of public favor turns against him. One of his most trusted friends turns against him and convinces him that Desdemona is having an affair with another of his friends. Othello is so blinded by jealousy and rage that he cannot see how his own band of men, his own "community" has turned against him and is pitting him against the people he used to trust the most. By the end of the play he is a beaten man, an outcast and a murderer, and his speech shows it. Shakespeare writes, "I am not valiant neither, / but every puny whipster gets my sword. / but why should honor outlive honesty? / Let it go all" (Shakespeare V, ii). Othello has been at the top, and he has reached the bottom, and the community no longer looks on him with respect, but with fear and some loathing. He is a beaten man, just as the man in the cafe is old and beaten, and he kills himself at the end of the play, just as the old man tried to kill himself unsuccessfully.

The two characters are both tragic because they have both outlived their usefulness in their own way, and they have been alienated from society because of their age or their actions. The old man is no longer useful even to the waiters, and Othello is no longer a trusted commander. They are classic examples of our society and how it tends to use up people until they no longer have any purpose, and then ostracize them because they are different, old, or tragic characters. Neither author seems to present a solution for the problems they see with alienation and community. Othello kills himself and there is some sadness from Lodovico when he says, "The time, the place, the torture: O, enforce it! / Myself will straight aboard: and to the state / This heavy act with heavy heart relate" (Shakespeare V, ii). Likewise, there is some sadness from the old waiter when he thinks about the old man. He says, "It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful.Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the cafe" (Hemingway). He understands that he is an outcast too, and he feels sympathetic toward the old man when few others do. He understands that society condemns and alienates anyone who is not "young" and "confident" like the young waiter.

In conclusion, both of these works have a theme of alienation from a community; they just simply present it in different ways. Othello is alienated from his community because he is a Moor (black) and he becomes unreliable, jealous, and essentially mad with his fears. He fears something different, the loss of love and the loss of friendship, but his fears are as real as those of the waiter in Hemingway's work. These two works show that a common theme can exist in far different pieces, and that many people's fears lead them to alienation from the people they care about and the community as a whole.

References

Bloom, Harold, ed. William Shakespeare's Othello. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Hemingway, Ernest. "A Clean Well-Lighted Place." Personal Web Site. 2005. 25 May 2005. http://home.eol.ca/~command/hem.htm

Shakespeare, William. "Othello." Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2000. 25 May 2005. http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/othello/

Sipiora, Phillip. "Chapter 4 Hemingway's Aging Heroes and the Concept of Phronesis." Aging and Identity: A Humanities Perspective. Eds. Deats, Sara Munson and Lagretta Tallent Lenker.….....