What is the tone/attitude toward the old man in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Ernest Hemingway?

Considered a
tour de force of the minimalist style, "A Clean Well-Lighted
Place" presents the pathos of twentieth-century man. After two World Wars, Western
civilization has gone awry, and man must reject tradition and history, accepting a certain
nothingness as the beginning because death and destruction is in the past.

The old man who sits and drinks knows and recognizes this nothingness as he drinks. He has
rejected all else and...