In Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1933), three characters—the young and old waiters and the drunken old man—represent three different stages of attachment to the world. The young waiter, who has a wife waiting for him at home, is relatively content with his life, whereas the older waiter and the old, deaf, and drunken customer are, as the British say, "waiting for God"—that is, they seek present comfort but see nothing worth living for.

When the young waiter expresses his disgust that the drunken customer, who has recently attempted suicide, takes too long to go home so that the waiters also have to wait to go home, the older waiter comments,

I am one of those who like to stay late at the café...With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.

The young waiter, who earlier has described himself as "all confidence," does not understand the older men's need for a "clean, well-lighted place" in which to moderate the effects of their complete despair, a despair that the old customer has tried to resolve by committing suicide.

The old customer and the old waiter are both detached from the present—the customer by his despair, his deafness, and his drunkenness, and the old waiter by his recognition that he has nothing pleasurable to look forward to—because their lives are essentially over, but they continue to go through the motions of living:

It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanliness and order...it was all nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada [nothing and nothing and, well, nothing].

The old waiter understands that even the order and light of the restaurant help to postpone having to recognize the nothingness that permeates his (and the old customer's) life, a belief that life is meaningless—except for momentary comfort—because he no longer has any purpose. Unlike the young waiter, who has "confidence" and a wife, the old waiter has neither, and he realizes that his philosophical belief in nothing—nada—defines his very existence.

Mark Twain once observed that all men are cowards at night, meaning that, at night, we are plagued by fears and regrets that life during day blots out. The old waiter, when he finally goes home,

. . . would lie in his bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it's probably only insomnia. Many must have it.

Although the story's omniscient narrator does not tell us what keeps the waiter awake until morning, we can infer, despite his belief in nothingness, that he has not reached quite the level of despair exemplified in the old customer's suicide attempt. There remains some part of the old waiter's attachment to life that struggles against the nothingness and leads him back every day to his "clean, well-lighted place."