ASSIGNMENT 10:
Stephen Crane, "The Blue Hotel"

Three men arrive by railroad at a nearly snow-bound town in Nebraska, called Fort Romper. The year is about 1895. Though a desolate prairie town, Romper is planning to install electric street-cars: the modern age is just around the corner, in this corner of the West. Pat Scully, the owner of its garishly blue-painted hostelry, "The Palace Hotel," is proud of these developments. The men embarking there are unnamed, therefore perhaps somewhat universalized figures: "the Cowboy," "the Easterner," and a man they refer to as a "Swede," though he may be "a Dutchman," while in fact he talks like any other American. This "Swede," who seems to have come from New York City, seems uncomfortable and even fearful from the moment he walks into the Palace and sees several other men, including Scully's son Johnny, disagreeing over a card game.

Why is the Swede nervous, even seemingly paranoid, afraid of being murdered? The various characters--residents and guests--try to determine why. Meantime they engage with the Swede, unsuccessfully, at conversation, over dinner and drinks, and eventually over the card table. An argument erupts: the Swede accuses Johnny of cheating; Johnny vehemently denies the charge; and the two men go out into the howling blizzard to fight. Johnny loses; the Swede departs for a neighboring tavern; he somewhat rudely accosts a stranger (another gambler), and is knifed to death. End of story . . . but not quite. Crane includes an epilogue, section 9 of the story, set several months after the Swede's murder; and there, as you'll see, the story becomes especially interesting and problematic.

In that final, ninth section of the story Crane has the Easterner tell the Cowboy that Johnny was, in fact, cheating the Swede at cards. He knew it, but did not rise to the Swede's defense. Why? What prejudices, what reason for solidarity with his fellows, what failure of ethical reasoning, kept him out of the fray and led him to even join the others in calling on Johnny Scully to kill the Swede? Moreover, why was the Swede so afraid, and when and how did his fear take root? To address such problems raised by the final section, readers will almost have to re-read Crane's story. Like detectives searching for interpretive clues, we need to comb back through the details of events described in "The Blue Hotel."

Crane published this story in Collier's magazine in 1898. He was then living in England, suffering acutely from the tuberculosis that would take his life in just a few years, and he was desperately in need of money. "The Blue Hotel" was written and published in these circumstances; yet it is the work of a writer at the peak of his artistic powers. The language of this story, rich in irony and metaphor and acute attention to realistic detail, as well as the careful structuring of its plot, so as to withhold key evidence from the reader, also repay a careful re-reading of it.

"The Blue Hotel" appeared in print at an historical juncture when Americans were keenly aware that the western frontier was closed. Romper, a former Cavalry outpost, becomes emblematic of that lost frontier. But not entirely lost. Discussing the Swede's puzzling attitude, the occupants of Scully's hotel consider that perhaps the man had been reading too many "dime novel" stories-too many cheap, paperback Western novels--and therefore thinks he's come to that West, a west of legend and myth, which the Cowboy describes in terms of "the shootin' and stabbin', and all." Keep in mind, however, that this is only their supposition; we have no evidence of it in the Swede's behavior. Still, the uncanny thing is that the Swede is stabbed, but by someone totally unconnected to the card game and fight at Scully's. Is the already legendary "Old West" somehow creating events in the actual, increasingly modern West? Is the Swede an unwitting victim of these cultural processes? Or, does he force the hand of fate in crucial ways? Is he even fated in the first place? And why can't he find the community and comradeship that he seems to desperately need?

These are key questions, and themes, in Crane's story. They are tied, as well, to Crane's critique of the mythic West. Supposedly a territory of freedom--from oppression, from bigotry, and from class or nationalistic hatreds (at least, that's the way that Crevecoeur, Whitman, and Twain imagined it)--Crane's new West is instead a site where suspicion, bigotry, and murderous hatred come easily into focus on a stranger such as the unnamed Swede. Remember, too, that this man has come from New York, already mythologized by Americans as a dangerous, dirty, hate-mongered urban sewer. Is Romper, with its plans for electric street cars, really any different than New York? Are characters like "the Cowboy," and "the Easterner" merely types, empty characters who are, all of them, really alike in modern America?

Reading Assignment

1. Stephen Crane, "The Blue Hotel" (pp. 768-787).

Writing Assignment

1. Eventually, we learn the names of 'the "the Cowboy" and "the Easterner." What are those names? Any significance to them, for example, the Easterner's name? Why, in your view, is it significant that we do not learn the Swede's name?
2. In re-examining the details of this story, what do you see as the Swede's (and thus, our own) earliest clue that Johnny might be dishonest at cards? How does that change your sense of the Swede? Of the Easterner?
3. Why does Pat Scully take the Swede upstairs to show him family mementos and the like? Is that effort successful, in your view? Discuss.
4. Why, in your view, does the Swede become a "board whacker" when he plays cards? What does that suggest about the Swede's character?
5. Crane tells his story from an omniscient perspective, and the narrator often indicates to us what characters like Scully and the Easterner are thinking. Yet we never gain entrance to the Swede's consciousness, do we? Why does Crane shape the story in this way? Another way of asking the same question: What effect does that denial of access have on readers?
6. In the second paragraph of section 8, Crane describes the presence of men on this forbidding landscape as "a marvel," and then says that one must "concede a glamour of wonder to these lice [men!] which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life." What "philosophy" of existence would seem to be defined by such a passage? Is that Crane's view, according to other evidence in the story? Discuss, in several well written paragraphs.
7. What if Crane had not attached the epilogue in section 9, and instead ended his story with the "dreadful legend" of the cash machine: "This registers the amount of your purchase." How would that alter your reading of the story?
8. In section 9, what does the Easterner mean in his "fog of mysterious theory" involving nouns and adverbs? What reading of the story does his explanation encourage?

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