Is "A Clean, Well-Light Place" similar to "This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona" when compared in relation to the word nada (nothing)?

Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Llighted Place" and Alexie's
"This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona" have several similarities that can be
related to the word nada (nothing) prevalently used in Hemingway's
story. One of them is that the stories are both about three men who are struggling in
some way or another to find, preserve, or assert their place in the community, in
life--who hold a place in their communities, in life, that is
nada.

For instance, in Hemingway's
story the old man who drinks with dignity is struggling to preserve his place in the
community and in life by drinking in a clean, well lighted place instead of in secret in
private at home. Whereas in Alexie's Thomas-Builds-the-Fire is struggling to assert his
place in the community and in life. Neither one have been having that much success: They
have nada.

Another similarity that can
be related to nada is the sparse authorial styles that are heavily
reliant on dialogue and only minimally reliant on a distant, objective narrator through
which each story is told. Such a style implies that the rest, the superfluous additions
and trimmings that may veil reality are
nada.

Hemingway, the uncontested
master of sparse distant objectivity, combines sparse statesments of Who and What with
bursts of poetic descriptions as in the opening line: "It was very late and everyone had
left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made
against the electric light." In this example, the elegant poetic description is part of
a restricting who-clause that describes the "old man" who is
excluded from "everyone" by the preposition "except" in the prepositional phrase "except
the old man."

Whereas Alexie's spareness is that of strings
of details without poetic or descriptive embelishment: "Just after Victor lost his job
at the BIA, he also found out that his father had died of a heart attack in Phoenix,
Arizona." In this example, the central Who is preceeded by an introductory preposition
locating Victor's upcoming experience in time. It is followed by the dilemma of the
story with a straightforward Who, What, How, and Where, but with no sudden descriptive
passages such as Hemingway employs.

Another similarity that
relates to nada is the theme of loneliness, which is dramatized by
the imagery of the lonely ones laying in bed. In Hemingway's, the old waiter goes home
after having thought of the value of a clean, well lighted place to lie in bed in
loneliness until falling asleep at dawn. While in bed, his lonely thoughts turn to the
consoling thought "it was probably only insomnia" and that "Many must have it." In
Alexie's, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, lonely and rejected in his tribe which has lost the
use for storytellers, wishes in his loneliness "to lie in his bed and let his dreams
tell his stories for him."