In Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid provides readers the brief look into the lives of two people from different worlds that contain identical characteristics. The two fictional stories contain an individual struggling to figure out who they are becoming, and what their lives mean depending on the circumstances the individual is facing. Ernest Hemingway and Jamaica Kincaid use themes, language, imagery, and symbols to allow readers to view the similar and different characteristics between the two fictional literary works. Ernest Hemingway is a very well known and missed American writer. What Hemingway brought to readers across the world was “a hard-bitten realism to American fiction” where “Hemingway’s…show more content… Jamaica Kincaid has published many famous works, including “Girl,” and where she is now currently a professor “at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California” (47), teaching individuals and spreading her knowledge on becoming a successful writer as herself. In “Girl,” Kincaid developed a prose poem, meaning that it lacked rhyme and contained semicolons and run on sentences. A prose filled with numerous advice and commands from a mother to her daughter, that distinctly seized the daughter’s feelings for her mother, the daughter was unable to barely put her input portrayed to the readers that the mother believes she is the only one that can save her daughter from the life of impoliteness and promiscuity, showing the theme of loneliness for the daughter due to her not being able to connect with the mother because of resentment. Also, the mother does not fail to mention and warn her own daughter to “prevent yourself from looking like the slut you are bent on becoming” (47); showing to readers that the mother has little faith in the daughter becoming anything other than a “slut,” which adds to the resentment the daughter has for the mother and also creating a sense of loneliness for the daughter due to failure of a mother-daughter…show more content… Both literary works provide different themes, whereas “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” contains an additional theme of anguish and depression. The reader will never know why the elder deaf man drinks his life away, is suicidal, has no wife with only a niece to take care of him showing that the elder man is depressed. Although the younger waiter has a wife waiting for him at home, and believes that the deaf elder man is lonely and that is not the younger waiter’s problem, he never realizes that maybe, the younger waiter will be lonely like the deaf elder man sometime in his life. The elder waiter relates to the elder man and understands his decision to stay late in the café due to him feeling a similar loneliness feeling just like the deaf elder man where the reader can assume the elder waiter may be depressed as well. The main symbol that Hemingway placed in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is the café. The café represents a clean and quiet place where one can be alone with their thoughts, a place with good lighting, which proposes the idea of certainty and organization. The elder men who enjoy their time being in the café late at night than going to their own comfortable home suggests that the café is a symbol of a safe haven for despair. Despair is disorganized, puzzling, and a dark place whereas the café is