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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Blue Hotel
The Palace Hotel, the titular “blue hotel,” stands out against the gray landscape of Fort Romper to such an extent that those who see it are “overcome.” It is a singular enticement in this rural Nebraska locality and, combined with the charms of its proprietor, one that is nearly irresistible to travelers. The symbol of the blue hotel thus parallels the story’s fatalistic energy in which certain destinations seem inevitable, even when the routes that lead there are far from linear. The Palace Hotel similarly does not entirely make sense—the blue paint attracts scorn—but nonetheless works: It “display[s] delights” and proves Pat Scully “a master of strategy” (363). The hotel itself is the first piece of questionable logic that readers are asked to accept in a story that is full of questionable logic.
The Blizzard
The blizzard that rages throughout the duration of “The Blue Hotel” offers another subverted trope. While Crane’s continual references to the weather suggest that the story will involve a conflict between man and nature, nature ultimately proves itself so indifferent to man as to have no effect on the Swede’s fate. The cowboy “[hopes they] don’t git snowed in, because then [they’d] have to stand this here man bein’ around with [them] all the time. That wouldn’t be no good” (374). What here feels like foreshadowing isn’t: They don’t get snowed in, the Swede isn’t around all the time, and his departure ends up being “no good.” Yet the blizzard is not entirely without consequence in the story; the weather leads to a landscape so unoccupied that it is “hard to imagine a peopled earth” (386), heightening the solitude that helps to drive the characters of “The Blue Hotel” to their extreme emotional reactions. It thus supports the theme of Isolation and Its Impact on the Human Psyche.
The Cash-Machine
At the end of the story’s climax, the Swede lies dead and the saloon sits empty, its occupants having scattered after the sudden violent crime. In the final sentence of Part 8, Crane writes, “The corpse of the Swede, alone in the saloon, had its eyes fixed upon a dreadful legend that dwelt atop of the cash-machine: ‘This registers the amount of your purchase’” (390). This image hearkens back to the multiple times in which the Swede attempts to pay Scully what he owes, to Scully’s repeated refusal. The issue of being in debt to someone and the attempts to discharge these debts suggest that perhaps the Swede’s murder is something that he is owed or has earned (cutting against the Easterner’s theory of Social Responsibility and Culpability). Yet this concept sits uneasily with the randomness of many events in the story, lending the cash-machine (which feels like an obvious symbol) a destabilizing energy. Like the other ways in which the story subverts readers’ expectations, it may simply indicate an absence of logic and thus point to The Meaninglessness of the Universe.
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By Stephen Crane
