"The Blue Hotel"

Paper Summary:

In this article, the writer discusses that when Stephen Crane wrote 'The Blue 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 writer notes that characters often have to face challenging environments or circumstances and retrogress until the fateful ending of despair or death. The writer points out that this story, written in 1899, includes a number of examples of how a person's inner nature impacts behavior - for the good or the bad.

From the Paper:

"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."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Crane, Stephen. "The Blue Hotel." Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Fourth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. 1626-1645
• Gibson, Donald, and Moore, Harry. Fiction of Stephen Crane. Urbana: Southern Illinois University, 1968

More papers on "The Blue Hotel":

• Book Review # 95350 : "'The Blue Hotel'"
• Book Review # 95362 : "The Blue Hotel" and Mankind"
• Book Review # 96587 : "The Blue Hotel" and Theme of Isolation"

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