In a world so confusing, so fatuous one can only ask, why are we here? What is life? What is the meaning of life? As one can either search for answers on either the side of existentialism or the side of nihilism for ones guidance. .
For the individual alienated from God, from man, from nature and from himself, what else is there but nothingness? While, "Modern man finds himself on the brink of a catastrophic precipice, below which is a gap to the absolute void, an uncompromised black, nothingness- (Spark Notes) . The kind of alienation, man's estrangement from his own true self. The existentialists of the twentieth century picked up on this idea and felt that man's nature is distorted because he has exalted reason above all else. An example is seen through the younger waiter of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,"" who utilizes an amoral reasoning process to justify his own comfort. Because he wants to go home to bed, he says to the old deaf man, "You should have killed yourself last week."" He also assumes that lacking money is a good enough reason for committing suicide and explains to the older waiter that having "plenty of money- makes life worth living. .
Since, there is no God in the atheistic existentialist economy, then there is nothing after death, and man suffers from an immense void. The older waiter in Hemingway's story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place- experiences this void, which renders him incapable of true rest; sleep eludes him throughout the night. And then because he has experienced the death of God, he goes on to recite the Lord's Prayer in blasphemous despair: "Our Nothing who are in Nothing - alone, the old waiter continues his train of thought, deciding that life is meaningless. He recites to himself the Lord's Prayer, except he removes all references to God and replaces them with "nada,"" the Spanish word for "nothing."" The older waiter does no more than name the void felt by most characters, a hunger they seek to assuage with alcohol, sex, and violence in an aimless progress from bar to bed to bullring.
