A Clean, Well-Lighted Place The Old Man Quotes

The old man looked at him. "Another brandy," he said.

"You'll be drunk," the waiter said. The old man looked at him. The waiter went away.

"He'll stay all night," he said to his colleague. "I'm sleepy now. I never get into bed before three o'clock. He should have killed himself last week."

The waiter took the brandy bottle and another saucer from the counter inside the cafe and marched out to the old man's table. He put down the saucer and poured the glass full of brandy.

"You should have killed yourself last week," he said to the deaf man. (6-7)

The lack of seriousness about death that the younger waiter displays shows his naïveté – at this early stage in his life, death isn't a serious issue, and he's not afraid of it.

"A little more," he said. The waiter poured on into the glass so that the brandy slopped over and ran down the stem into the top saucer of the pile. "Thank you," the old man said. The waiter took the bottle back inside the cafe. He sat down at the table with his colleague again.

"He's drunk now," he said.

"He's drunk every night." (8-9)

Here, we see the old man's dependence on alcohol; he needs to be drunk every night to survive everyday life.

The old man looked from his glass across the square, then over at the waiters.

"Another brandy," he said, pointing to his glass. The waiter who was in a hurry came over.

"Finished," he said, speaking with that omission of syntax stupid people employ when talking to drunken people or foreigners. "No more tonight. Close now."

"Another," said the old man. (10)

The young waiter, unsympathetic to the old man's troubles, is incredibly condescending to the drunk man, as though his drunkenness means that he's stupid. However, being drunk certainly doesn't signal being oblivious here – the implication is that the old man knows better than the young one.