When our lives begin, we are innocent and life is beautiful, but as we grow older and time slowly and quickly passes we discover that not everything about life is quite so pleasing. Along with the joys and happiness we experience there is also pain, sadness and loneliness. Hemingway"s "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and Eliot"s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" both tell us about older men who are experiencing these dreadful emotions. In Hemingway"s short story there are three characters, two waiters and their customer. Of these three, two are older men who are experiencing extreme loneliness. The...
and his inferiority complex are touchingly revealed when he tells us, "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. // I do not think they will sing to me." It is this forlorn attitude that moves us. He is extremely lonely and yet, he cannot do anything about it.

In both these works men talk of loneliness and sadness. They are all alone in a world filled with people. The misery they experience from this feeling of solitude moves the reader because we have all at one point or another felt likewise even if not to that intensity.