Stephen Crane's stories "The Blue Hotel"

His suspicious attitude and his secure conviction that he will eventually be killed piecemeal make it clear to the other characters, including the Easterner and the Cowboy, that he is gripped by popular ideas of the wild, lawless West. As the Easterner says, "this man has been reading material dime novels, and he thinks he's even off out in the substance of it--the shootin' and stabbin' and all" (407). The men are all am partd by the idea that he has mistaken their civilized town for such(prenominal) a place and Scully tries to calm him by taking him away for a quiet drink and showing him pictures of his wife and his groundless daughter in order to assure him of the normalcy of vivification in the town.

But Scully's efforts do not mean that the turnip cabbage gives up his wild ideas. He calms down, but his delusion is "not relinquished, merely mastered" (Weiss 161). When he claims Johnnie is cheating at their nib game a fight ensues, the Swede wins and goes off to the tap house where he aggressively provokes the town's gambler who stabs him in a struggle. In the coda to the story the Easterner meets the Cowboy much ulterior and reveals that the court has gone easy on the gambler and presumption him only three years for killing the Swede. But he also reveals that he too had seen Johnnie's pointless cheating and he claims that by refusing to back up the Swede he shares in the guilt for the Swede's death. As the Easterner says, however, "We, five

The Swede's attitudes are mocked by the citizens and his maniacal need for/ misgiving of take in this town is seen as a manifestation of insanity. It is insanity, of course, but, as events show, it is not the kind of insanity the town thinks it is. Instead of creation groundless because he believes this is a lawless place, the Swede is crazy only because he has a desire to be killed and a compulsion to act in a manner that ensures that he will get what he fears and desires most. He has, however, come to the right place. All the things that conspire in the Swede's death--the Scullys' enjoyment of the brutal fight, the Cowboy's desire to provoke more(prenominal) forcefulness, the gambler's knife--make up the sort of raw, untamed violence that the Swede was looking for.

The irony is that until the Easterner examined his own fear of this violence no one questions their claims to being civilized and above such things.

Weiss, who concentrates on the question of the desire of the Swede, "psychotic to dispirit with," for the kind of punishment he fears so greatly, ignores the importance of the circumstance of the Swede's delusion about the town. Weiss says that this "framework" is "trivial, perhaps a weakness" in the story (158). He identifies the weakness as Crane's use of the "widespread, half-comic assumption on the part of Easterners and Europeans in the nineties that the horse opera United States were inhabited solely by cowpokes, Indians and bandits" as the butt of the Swede's delusions (158). "But the Swede," Weiss argues, cannot be "measured by ordinary standards" and he raises this flimsy foundation to significance (158-59). This misses the importance of the setting in the story. The idea is "half-comic" and is viewed in this way by the inhabitants of the town. Scully reads his newspaper and has his family slightly him and the town's gambler, though a "thieving card-player," is, "in all matters distant his business," "so generous, so just, so moral" that he is more virtuous than most of
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