The Blue Hotel

“The Blue Hotel” operates on subversion by setting up narrative expectations and then failing to fulfill them. The story foreshadows events that never come to fruition and introduces characters who do little. Instead, characters exhibit overblown reactions to emotional triggers, leading to consequences that readers may variously interpret as either inevitable or entirely avoidable based on the way in which Crane toys with expectations about what is “supposed to” happen in a story.

For example, the old farmer who is playing cards with Johnnie at the beginning of the story holds no clear purpose in the text, though he is mentioned several times. Just as the tension between the Swede and the others begins to mount, the farmer leaves the hotel and vanishes from the story. Similarly, the men who are drinking with the gambler when the Swede arrives at the saloon vanish so unobtrusively when the violence occurs that it is only after they are gone that the narrative even notes their absence. This is particularly unusual given that the story identifies one of these men as a district attorney; readers might expect him to stand as a figure of law and order during a scene in which a crime takes place, but his presence is simply another loose end.

In rejecting the notion that there must be a narrative payoff to every narrative element, Crane creates a feeling of randomness that is antithetical to the usual experience of reading fiction. Put differently, Crane writes a story that is not meant to feel like a story at all. Rather, its randomness mimics real life in that people do not have a direct function (as characters typically do). In “The Blue Hotel,” a character may be present simply because he is present and may leave simply because he leaves; he need not do anything to justify his existence in the story.

Crane does not merely include extraneous characters, however, but offers active misdirection and presents motifs that do not culminate in the “logical” result. The references to the blizzard, for example, do not foreshadow the conflict between humanity and nature that they seem to. The cowboy “[hopes they] don’t get snowed in, because then [they’d] have to stand this here man bein’ around” (373-74), and Crane makes a rare (and therefore noticeable) shift into the first person to discuss how the might of the storm makes the Earth seem deserted. This suggests a link to the theme of Isolation and Its Impact on the Human Psyche. However, the Swede is not trapped by the storm, and he does not die in it, despite its fatal power. In fact, for all Crane’s poetic descriptions, the storm does not emerge as a clear metaphor for anything. It’s just a storm that happens to be blowing on the day that the Swede is killed.

Crane’s refusal to make each element of his story “mean something” in a way that leads directly to the story’s conclusion reflects his abiding sense of The Meaninglessness of the Universe and its indifference to human affairs. Crane was an atheist, and his fictional worlds lack the sense of meaning in everyday occurrence that can come with faith. However, like many irreligious writers of the 19th century, Crane is concerned with what might fill the void that religion occupies for others. The result in “The Blue Hotel” is a world that is apathetic to the machinations of man, but uneasily so. For Crane, the absence of faith is not a particularly comforting condition.

What ultimately emerges is a story with a challenging sense of cause and effect, which makes the tale’s final element—the question of Social Responsibility and Culpability in the murder of the Swede—particularly complex. Perhaps Johnnie is at fault for cheating in the first place. Alternatively, the Easterner may be complicit in his silence. Then again, Scully might have better managed his frustration—or, later, not managed it, for if he had not let the Swede leave the hotel, the man might have lived. The path from the arrival at the Palace Hotel to the Swede’s death in the saloon is indirect, which makes it nearly impossible to say which step ultimately sealed his fate—or, as Crane might have characterized it, led him toward an ending that was not fate at all, but rather the culmination of a series of events that were only marginally affected by each character’s actions and desires.