28 pages • 56 minutes read
Stephen CraneThe Blue Hotel
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1898A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Archetype
An archetype is “a character, situation, emotion, symbol, or event that is recurrent throughout different stories from many cultures. Because of the frequency with which these are scene, they’re considered universal symbols” (“Literary Devices.” SuperSummary) In “The Blue Hotel,” characters are predominantly referred to by their “type”: the Easterner, the Swede, the cowboy, the bartender, the gambler, and Scully, who is called the “proprietor” and the “Irishman” at various points. These archetypes refer to profession or geographic/ethnic origin, evoking certain ideas about each figure, even amongst the characters themselves. Yet Crane also invites readers to view these types with skepticism. The Easterner, for example, is introduced as a “little silent man from the East, who didn’t look it, and didn’t announce it” (363). Later, the gambler is such a just and moral man that “a scrutiny of the group [he sat with] would not have enabled an observer to pick the gambler from the men of more reputable pursuits” (388). These two ill-fitting archetypes bookend the story, reminding the reader that they can’t necessarily trust their assumptions about the characters. The fact that Scully uses names for his guests—he calls the Easterner “Mr. Blanc” and the cowboy “Bill”— further emphasizes that using these archetypes as names is a choice; it’s not as though they don’t have names, or even necessarily that the character themselves don’t know those names.
Crane thus subverts the very archetypes that he continually asserts. The cowboy is not a man of action but of inaction, the bartender does not drink, and the Swede may not be Swedish. Using these general descriptors and then upending them calls into question whether any generalizations can be made by “type,” even while opening the possibility that these men could be any men, and that this plot could happen to anyone. It thus underscores the theme of The Meaninglessness of the Universe, as the characterization seems as incidental and random as anything else.
Dialect
Dialects, or subvariants of a language based on location, ethnicity, or other cultural factors, help an author create atmosphere in a text and add nuance to characters. In “The Blue Hotel,” this permits Crane to emphasize the cultural differences of his characters; Johnnie and the cowboy speak in a Western dialect (“I don’t know nothing about you […] and I don’t give a damn where you’ve been. All I got to say is that I don’t know what you’re driving at. There hain’t never been nobody killed in this room” [366]), the Easterner and the Swede use more standard English with less slang, and Scully, an Irishman turned Westerner who draws from books, speaks in a combination of tones depending on his mood.
Irony
Irony, as a literary device, occurs when something in a text operates in a way different from (and especially directly opposite to) its expected meaning. In “The Blue Hotel,” this goes hand in hand with Crane’s moments of subversion. The cowboy, for example, evokes through his name action and adventure yet does the least of all the characters in the text. The district attorney, similarly, flees the scene of the crime rather than investigating or witnessing it. Much of Crane’s irony is self-aware: He does not hide but rather emphasizes that he is playing with the expectations of his readers, inviting them to consider what these narrative swerves may mean.
Point of View
The point of view of a text describes the position (often a person) from which the story is told. In “The Blue Hotel,” the point of view is third person omniscient, which means that the narrator is unlikely to be one of the characters in the story, that “he/she/they” pronouns are used to refer to characters (except in dialogue), and that the narrator has access to all the major characters’ interiority. Despite this, the narrator reveals virtually nothing about the story’s central mystery: why the Swede so strongly believes he will be murdered. Contrasted with the objectivity with which the narrator documents other thoughts and feelings, this omission heightens the sense of inexplicability. It is as though no answer to the question exists.
At the beginning of Part 8, the narration briefly turns toward the first-person plural: “We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity, but here, with the bugles of the tempest pealing, it was hard to imagine a peopled earth” (386). The disruption in voice reminds readers of the narrator, which in turn reminds them that this is a story.
Repetition
Crane uses repetition, particularly in dialogue, to highlight the absurdity of his characters’ emotional reactions. For the most part, these repetitions seem to be clues for the reader, not for the other characters; when the characters hear repetition, they take it to mean that the speaker really means what he says, even as it highlights to readers that the speaker has very little grounds for what he says. There is, however, one case in which the repetition takes on an aware irony within the story. When Johnnie fights the Swede, the cowboy becomes swept up in the violence: “Go it, Johnnie! go it! Kill him! Kill him!” (381). Later, having won the fight, the Swede mockingly repeats this back: “[The Swede] turned to the cowboy. ‘Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!’ he mimicked, then guffawed victoriously. ‘Kill him!’ He was convulsed with ironical humor” (385). The repetition that is previously a joke to the reader now becomes a joke to the Swede as well.
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