Crane When Stephen Crane Wrote

Crane

When Stephen Crane wrote TheBlue Hotel, several themes were popular in literature. One of these was naturalism, or the belief that natural forces, such as heredity, environment and physical and emotional drives motivate people to act as they do. The characters often have to face challenging environments or circumstances and retrogress until the fateful ending of despair or death. This story, written in 1899, includes a number of examples of how a person's inner nature impacts behavior -- for the good or bad.

The Blue Hotel takes place at an ominous inn in Fort Romper, Nebraska, where a Swedish tailor takes a room run by Pat Scully. A noisy cowboy and a quiet Easterner named Blanc are also there. A game of card starts with Scully's son, Johnnie, the cowboy, Blanc, and the Swede. The Swede accuses Johnnie of cheating, and the two have a fistfight. The Swede knocks Johnnie down, swaggers drunkenly to his room, packs up and heads to a saloon.

The Swede boasts that he beat Johnnie and asks some card players to have a drink. When a gambler politely refuses, the Swede grows violent. The gambler kills the Swede and gets a three-year prison sentence. Months later, Blanc and the cowboy meet again. It turns out Johnnie was cheating, Blanc was not man enough to say so, the cowboy just wanted to fight, and Scully was partly responsible as well. Blanc concludes: "Every sin is the result of a collaboration... And that fool of an unfortunate gambler... gets all the punishment." The sluggish cowboy replies, "Well, I didn't do anythin', did I?"

Literary critics disagree on the actual positive or negative theme of this story. Some think Crane is promoting the main theme of the brotherhood of man, joining together against a hostile environment where order and meaning in life can only be maintained if a person recognizes and fulfills his responsibility as a link in "the magnetic chain of humanity." Others believe that the story actually means that humans are determined creatures. Human behavior is so complex and difficult to understand that no people have control over their destinies when involved with other people (Gibson & Moore 169).

It appears, especially given the theme of naturalism that Crane used in his other literary works, that the second version is more probable. This comes across especially in two quotes in the story. The first of these statements that show this sense of naturalism is "We are all in it! This poor gambler isn't even a noun. He is kind of an adverb. Every sin is the result of a collaboration. We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede. Usually there are from a dozen to forty women really involved in every murder, but in this case it seems to be only five men -- you, I, Johnnie, old Scully, and that fool of an unfortunate gambler came merely as a culmination, the apex of a human movement, and gets all the punishment."

Crane uses the analogy of sentence structure to show the place that each character holds. The gambler is compared to an adverb or a modifier part of speech, rather than a noun or verb, which suggests that he had little control over his fate and the Swede most likely had less. As an adverb, the gambler has no action until someone else, some verb, takes action before him and makes him follow through.

If the situation in the hotel had not occurred in the same way, for example, the two men did not get in a fight and the Swede stormed away, the gambler would not even been a part of the story. The poor gambler was just an adverb who came at the end of the sentence and "merely as a culmination, the apex of a human movement and got all the punishment" (in fact, a three-year 'sentence'!). The Swede has no control, either, because he is at the mercy of the five men who were already destined to ruin his life one way or the other as soon as he entered the blue hotel. The Swede may have been a trouble maker, but he was right about his accusations. He had to grab the gambler at the saloon, because the gambler was already destined to act. They were all part of an 'act' in a play that was already rehearsed and going to be performed like it or not.

The other passage in the story that is very telling is:

One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smitten, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb.

Here, in one sentence is Crane's understanding of the world in which humans live. As the naturalist, he observed and wrote about the world around him from the Darwinian "survival of the fittest" perspective. He perceived the world and everything on it prescribed by these uncaring natural laws, which could be very harmful to humans. And what are humans? Freak accidents of nature, lice, that hang on to the world by being parasites. This is not a very positive view, by any means.

This theme is strengthened by the Crane's use of weather. The men fight in the swirling snow and the Swede walks through this blinding snow to the saloon. Here is nature in its raw form. These men have no more control over their own lives as they do to change the weather. In fact, much of Crane's naturalism theme is created through his use of imagery. The playing with cards, which is random in their shuffling. The blue color of the hotel its setting. The distinction is made between the inside the hotel with a stove and warmth and outside with the storm, which is the conflict between man and his environment. The uncontrollable snow also symbolizes the violence of the human community it encloses in the Blue Hotel. In fact, humans may even be more violent than this snow storm, itself, as Crane writes earlier that the hotel "was always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a gray swampish hush."

The quotation noted above about the lice, in fact, continues and adds to this theory of man and his place in nature:... "the conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life. One was a coxcomb not to die in it. Humans may be vain and consider themselves higher than others, but they are just fools who are at the whims of the storms of nature.