SOURCE: Cox, James Trammel. “Stephen Crane as Symbolic Naturalist: An Analysis of ‘The Blue Hotel’.” Modern Fiction Studies 3, no. 2 (summer 1957): 147-58.

[In the following essay, Cox offers an analysis of “The Blue Hotel” to illustrate his thesis that Stephen Crane is more of a symbolist than a naturalist.]

The limitations of labels are less apparent when the term, like naturalism, has clearly definable boundaries than when it suffers from an excess of meaning, as in the much discussed omnibus romanticism. But they are no less real, and no less critically inhibiting. In the case of naturalism I would say this is particularly true, and as it has been applied to the fiction of Stephen Crane the effect has been to encourage a view and a lethargy which Crane hardly deserves. R. W. Stallman is almost alone in perceiving a fundamental difference in the fictional method of Crane and that of other naturalists in American fiction; and the value of his work in the eyes of many of the critics of American literature has been obscured by the set features, like a comic mask, of French naturalism. As articulated by Zola in Le roman expérimental, it is a central doctrine that “le naturalisme, je le dis encore, consiste uniquement dans la méthode expérimentale, dans l'observation et l'expérience appliquees à la littérature” and that “la méthode atteint la forme elle-même.” And it is this linkage of form and matter, uncritically accepted since the 1870's as an unalterable constituent of literary naturalism, that is at the root of our failure to recognize significant distinctions between our own naturalists, such as Dreiser or Norris or Crane. We are too quick to assume that any determinist not only has a certain familiar body of ideas but employs a certain method in the presentation of these ideas, that, of course, of the reporter or mere recorder of life.

With Crane this assumption has indeed been qualified to the extent of recognizing a difference, quantitatively at least, in the cumulation of detail, between Crane, say, and Dreiser. Further, a tendency to render much of his material visually, together with an exaggeration of his well-known haste in composition, has combined to demand some sort of qualification of Crane's naturalism; but all too frequently this qualification appears only in the equally half-safe addition of the adjective impressionistic, while the underlying assumption remains that Crane as a literary naturalist is also a literalist. Emotional perhaps, eclectic perhaps, Crane, a sort of cub “reporter” lives on.

It is consequently my purpose in the following analysis of “The Blue Hotel” to establish first of all that Crane's fictional method is that of the symbolist rather than the naturalist in that he carefully selects his details not as pieces of evidence in a one-dimensional report on man but as connotatively associated parts of an elaborately contrived symbolic substructure. Secondly, I am concerned to arrive at what this substructure means. More briefly, I hope to demonstrate the extent to which Stephen Crane is and is not a naturalist, in the abused sense of the term.

The total conceit, which it seems to me “The Blue Hotel” essentially is, fantastically extended and elaborately interwoven, will perhaps emerge with greater clarity if we begin somewhat undramatically at the symbolic center of the story. This I take to be the stove, with the rest of the story, like the room and the hotel itself, “merely [its] proper temple.” Crane centers our attention upon it immediately upon the entry of Scully with his guests “through the portals of the blue hotel.” For the room which they enter is described as “merely a proper temple for an enormous stove, which, in the centre, was humming with godlike violence. At various points on its surface the iron had become luminous and glowed yellow from the heat” (287).¹ While tonally a little grandiose as literal description, the language used here in this picture of the stove takes on considerable significance when we have noted more than twenty instances in which man is metaphorically shown to “embrace [this] glowing iron.” For instance, the cowboy is referred to as “bronzed” (287). Scully's cap is said to cause “his two red ears to stick out stiffly, as if they were made of tin” (287). Also “The cowboy and the Easterner burnished themselves fiery red with this water, until it seemed to be some kind of metal polish” (287). The picture of Scully's daughter has the “hue of lead” (295). The Swede's eyes and Johnnie's cross “like blades” (300), and again “the two warriors ever sought each other in glances that were at once hot and steely” (302). At the fight the Easterner is pictured as “hopping up and down like a mechanical toy” (305). Scully is the “iron-nerved master of the ceremony” (305). The fight is described as presenting “no more detail than a swiftly revolving wheel” (305), and aside from this picture of the fight as a wheel the Swede is described at supper as having “fizzed like a firewheel” (299). Wheel as a verb is also used four times (291, 292, 293, and 299). After the first knock-down the fighters are “actuated by a new caution as they advanced toward collision” (306). The Swede is pictured as “breathing like an engine” (307). And when Johnnie is ready to fight again Scully doesn't tell the cowboy to get out of the way but to “‘git out of the road’” (306).

What these indiscriminantly mechanical and/or metallic references have to do with the stove will become increasingly evident when we have gone on to the first group of symbolically related contrasts, white-red, snow-fire, and fear-anger. For the present, however, the purpose of these equations, to identify man with the stove, is suggested more specifically in the two pictures below, first, of the Easterner and then of Scully. For when the fight is over and the group has come back inside, the Easterner “rushed to the stove. He was so profoundly chilled that he almost dared to embrace the glowing iron” (308). And when Scully follows the Swede upstairs to dissuade him from leaving, it would seem that he has embraced the glowing iron—in the sense of enclosed within—: “Scully's wrinkled visage showed grimly in the light of the small lamp he carried. This yellow effulgence, streaming upward, coloured only his prominent features, and left his eyes, for instance, in mysterious shadow. He resembled a murderer” (294). For this “murderer's” visage is the same color as that of the surface of the stove, yellow; and it would thus seem to be the stove, “humming with godlike violence,” which Crane has in mind as the “engine of life” in the summarizing passage below wherein the indirect statement and the direct meet: “The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life—” (311). Or, philosophically stated, man's inner nature is egocentric, and it is this egocentrism in contact with environment which creates the storm or fundamental conflict relationship between man and his environment.

Thus by the use of the color yellow for its surface and the central position of the stove, spatially and imagistically, together with the supporting figures of speech equating man and metal, Crane in the symbol of the stove sets up a definition of man's inner nature as burning with elemental aggressions, “humming with godlike violence.”

Support for this view of the function of the stove is abundantly evident, as suggested above, in the way Crane relates the contrast clusters white-red, fear-anger, and snow-fire. First let us note three occasions in which whiteness is associated with fear. “… it seemed to the Swede that he was formidably menaced. He shivered and turned white near the corners of his mouth” (290). Again when the Swede resolves to leave the room because of his fearful conviction that he is going to be killed, he is described as “the whitefaced man” (293). Similarly, the alarmed Easterner, as the Swede later thrusts his fist into Johnnie's face during the card game, is described as having grown “pallid” (301). As instances of what is often called natural symbolism, these repetitions are hardly adequate to establish white as a part of a contrived symbolic structure, but as the contrasting association of red with anger emerges in the material to come and a conflict relationship is insisted upon between the two, it becomes evident that these associations do have such a function. For instance in the first scuffle, Johnnie is pictured with “his red face appearing over his father's shoulder” (303). And the Swede, whose actions on a narrative level exemplify the extremes suggested here, is pictured so: “Upon the Swede's deathly pale cheeks were two spots brightly crimson” (294). The same slightly ludicrous image is repeated during the fight, significantly, I think, attached to the other characters as well as the Swede: “Occasionally a face, as if illumined by a flash of light, would shine out ghastly and marked with pink spots” (303). Again it is not without ironic finality when the gambler “wiped his knife on one of the towels that hung beneath the bar rail” (315), leaving inevitably the red stain of blood on the white towel.

In these instances the associations involve color alone and the connection between this material and the symbolic significance of the stove is hardly apparent, but with the addition of snow and fire to white and red, as linked to fear and anger, the connection becomes not only clear but meaningful in the same terms that the stove is meaningful. For instance, in the Swede's first flush of defiance as he raises Scully's bottle to his lips, he looks at Scully with a glance “burning with hatred” (296). After supper as the Swede claps Scully on his sore shoulder, Johnnie expects his father to “flame out” (300) over the matter. Later when the Swede thrusts his first into Johnnie's face his eyes are “blazing orbs” (301). And the room, after this scuffle, is said to be “lighted with anger” (302). The corresponding contrast, linking snow with white and fear, may also be seen in this line: “A gatepost like a still man with a blanched face stood aghast amid this profligate fury” (288). And the ultimate fusion of these two together in imagery that is loaded with dramatic tension is especially apparent in the passages following: “When the party rounded the corner they were fairly blinded by the pelting of the snow. It burned their faces like fire” (308). Also the earth, in the crucial paragraph mentioned above containing the reference to the “engine of life,” is described as a “fire-smitten, ice-locked … bulb” (311). And in front of the saloon when the Swede reaches the town “an indomitable red light was burning, and the snowflakes were made blood-colour as they flew through the circumscribed territory of the lamp's shining” (311). Thus symbolically through the fire, fear and anger are brought into relationship with the stove, so that we may now see it—or man—as burning not only with elemental aggressions but also with elemental fears and the stove with its yellow surface as the same sort of tension-bursting symbol as that of its opposite, the snow that “burned … like fire.”

And with man's inmost nature represented by the stove, inside this “proper temple,” this “den … now hideous as a torture chamber” (301), the following description of the storm outside as a sea is not surprising: “the two little windows presented views of a turmoiling sea of snow” (288). For if the stove is “the engine of life,” or the inmost point of his inner nature, the snow and the outside would almost have to be his environment, or the sea of life. And again such is the implication, with a comment on man's essential isolation, of this line: “No island of the sea could be exempt [from the fury of the storm] in the degree of this little room with its humming stove.” And this metaphor is repeated as the men go out to fight: “The men lowered their heads and plunged into the tempest as into a sea” (304). Again as the Swede leaves the hotel and starts toward town he “tacked across the face of the storm as if he carried sails” (310).

At this point, looking upon the blue hotel almost in the sense of the Anglo Saxon banhus (with its “two little windows” presenting only the view of a “turmoiling sea of snow” and its “enormous stove” within “humming with godlike violence,” we need only to consider the reflections of the Easterner during the fight outside to fix these major symbols to Crane's most explicit statement of this conflict, which is both within man in the conflicting relationship between the elemental forces of fear and anger and outside in the conflicting relationship between this inner nature and his environment. For as the Easterner watches the preparations for the fight outside—or the narrative objectification of the condition we are concerned with—it seems to him that “the entire prelude had in it a tragedy greater than the tragedy of action …” (305). And that this tragedy is his condition seems confirmed in the Easterner's thoughts a few moments later when the fight has started: “To the Easterner there was a monotony of unchangeable fighting that was an abomination. This confused mingling was eternal to his sense …” (306).

Now, retaining this concept of man's inner nature as central, we are in a position to follow the really amazing number of ironic contrasts by which Crane adds to this hub of his definition. And if we keep in mind Crane's own description of the Swede as a “firewheel,” it will seem that these contrasts are the spokes of that wheel which, when spun, fizzes with such a dazzling, bewildering array of confused and blended contradictions, historically, psychologically, and culturally.

The first of these contrasts is that between animal man, represented by the characters of the story and the West, and civilized man, represented by the Easterners, who pass through Fort Romper on the train and who, used to “the brown reds and the sub-divisions of dark greens of the East” and possessed of “opulence … splendor … creeds … classes … [and] egotisms,” have “no colour in common” with the “citizens of this prairie town” (286) who paint their hotels blue. And to draw such a contrast seems to be the purpose of Crane's twenty-one references in which his characters are likened to animals. Just to note a few: the Swede casts a “wolfish glare upon Scully” (300); Scully turns “panther-fashion” (304) upon the Swede; their calm as Johnnie and the Swede prepare to fight has “elements of leonine cruelty in it” (305); and the cowboy is pictured as bolting forward “with the speed of a broncho” (306). It should not be overlooked in this contrast, however, that both the Swede and Mr. Blanc are from the East themselves, so that in effect the action of the story reveals their “civilization” to be but a thin veil over their essential nature and they, like the Easterners on the train, have more colors in common with these citizens of Fort Romper than they suspect.

In much the same way an historical contrast emerges from the language surrounding the fight, for terms and figures appropriate to both the combat of Celtic and Roman and that of modern warfare are used. For example, the return of Scully and the Swede from upstairs is the “entry of two roisterers from a banquet hall” (297). The supper later is a “feast” to which the domination of the Swede gives “an appearance of a cruel bacchanal” (299). And as Johnnie and the Swede first begin to fight inside, they are “two warriors” (302). When they all join in the scuffling and shouting they are a “riotous band” (302). And the cowboy at the end of this is sweating “from his efforts to intercept all sorts of raids” (303). After the scuffle a change is said to have come over Scully's now “Celtic visage” (303). During the fight outside his face is “set in the severe impersonal lines that are pictured on the countenances of the Roman veterans” (305). Inside again after the fight he mutters to himself with “Celtic mournfulness” (308). And the women like some tribal group fall upon Johnnie “amid a chorus of lamentation” (308). All of this language suggestive of the Roman invasion of England in the first century BC is actually devoted to the description of a fist-fight in Fort Romper in the late nineteenth century, so that an historical contrast is sufficiently established in this fact; however a good portion of the language is also appropriate to modern warfare. Shortly after they have washed up, for example, the new guests are pictured as having “trooped heavily back into the front room” (288). After supper they “filed toward the other room” (300). During the scuffle Johnnie is described as trying to break through the “rank formed by Scully and the Easterner” (302). As the group go outside “the snowflakes are streaming southward with the speed of bullets” (304). And during the fight outside the cowboy is caught up in a “holocaust of warlike desire” (305). The cheer from the others as the Swede falls is like “a chorus of triumphant soldiery” (307). And the consequence of language like this is again to emphasize man's fundamentally unchanging nature, whether from East or West, whether his combat be with the mace, the fist, or bullets.

A further contrast of considerable significance in Crane's cumulative definition of man and his universe is to be found in his notion of heaven and hell, again incorporated in the story indirectly, through the imagery, which depicts the blue hotel as alternately the House of God and Hell, while Scully, the proprietor, figures both as God (or one of his many representatives) and as Satan. First, for instance, Scully is pictured reading his newspaper as “curiously like an old priest” (300). And the first “ceremony” (287) performed by this “old priest” for his new guests is to conduct them to three basins of the “coldest water in the world” where the cowboy and the Easterner burnish themselves a “fiery red” and the Swede only dips his fingers “with trepidation” (287)—in the travesty of an ironic baptism, by fire and by fear. The Swede's place in this context—before his “conversion” upstairs by Scully's bottle of “firewater”—is clearly indicated in the picture of him making “the gesture of a martyr” (291). And the three basins referred to here might be overlooked except for the repetition of these three circles in the account of the Swede's effort to pay Scully, when “they both stood gazing in a strange fashion at three silver pieces on the Swede's open palm” (295). For the total being 75¢, these three silver pieces must have been quarters or three equal circles, symbol of the Trinity; and the implication would be that in Scully's house the true god is money—god in three pieces. The presence of the Holy Ghost is also suggested in the subtle effect of the abrupt transition and the use of the reflexive himself in the following: “The wind tore at the house, and some loose thing beat regularly against the clapboards like a spirit tapping. A door opened, and Scully himself entered” (291). Nor is the Son missing from the imagery, for in the following account of the Son's sacrifice to man, in the person of the Swede, who has knocked him down, the failure to use His son or Johnnie rather than The son seems deliberately contrived to echo a religious extension: “‘Are you any good yet, Johnnie?’ asked Scully in a broken voice. The son gasped and opened his eyes languidly” (307). And it is also the father-son relationship called to our attention here: “by his glance the cowboy could tell that this man was Johnnie's father” (306). And finally it is in these terms that Scully's apparently rhetorical question in his effort to quiet the quarrel becomes meaningful: “‘What do I keep? What do I keep? What do I keep? … I keep a hotel, do you mind? A guest under my roof has sacred privileges’” (299).

And on the other side of these three coins, there is to be found a certain amount of reference devoted to Scully as Satan and his house as hell, which, together with the above, serves to establish the same sort of defining contrasts we have seen working all the way through the story. First, the fire symbolism already treated is everywhere applicable to a view of the hotel as hell. And the room which is originally a “proper temple” is also a “little den [that] was now hideous as a torture-chamber” (301). It is also significant that the only profanity in the entire story is the word hell, which takes on, for example, nicely ironic overtones in Johnnie's reply to the Swede's speculation concerning the number of men killed in this room: “‘what in hell are you talking about?’” (290). Again it is ironic when the Easterner explains that “‘he [the Swede] thinks he's in the middle of hell’” (297). And turning from the hotel to its proprietor, it is not unmeaningful to find that Scully's shoulder “was tender from an old fall” (300) or that he has “red ears” (287) and a sort of Mephistophelean “nimble [ness]” (287). Finally the somewhat forced association, which would put a snake in the middle of the floor in mid-winter in the Midwest, serves also to identify this “torture-chamber” with hell: “The Swede sprang up from the card game with the celerity of a man escaping from a snake on the floor” (291). Thus as another spoke in the cultural, historical, psychological firewheel that is man, we must add his concepts of God, the function of these contrasting references being to suggest that all of heaven and hell are actually here on earth ironically in the banhus of man's own mind, which is essentially egocentric and animalistic.

The mind's consciousness of this condition appears, as we have already seen, on the occasion of the fight outside, in the reflections of the Easterner, Mr. Blanc—or, anglicized, White—whose awareness as opposed to Johnnie's and ultimately the Swede's is as different as white and black. And it is this awareness, which sees life as a grimly serious, eternal struggle, and the blindness of those who see it as a mere game that is the subject of a further contrast symbolized in the game of cards. The first hint that the game of cards is representative of life and/or an “eternal conflict” comes in the Swede's response to the invitation to join in: “He asked some questions about the game, and learning that it wore many names, and that he had played it when it was under an alias, he accepted the invitation” (289). And seen as the game of life, this card game is well described by the cowboy, who remarks, “‘Yes, this is a queer game’” (297). Similarly meaningful in these terms is the Easterner's repeated cry during the first scuffle: “‘What's the good of fighting over a game of cards?’” (303). Technically the irony here is brilliant, for it is the Easterner alone who recognizes the significance of the fight as life itself, “a monotony of unchangeable fighting that is an abomination … eternal to his sense” and who knows that life is hardly a game and a game of cards is. It is thus again ironic that Johnnie jumps up from the game with an “instinctive care for the cards and the board” (301), for in his blindness life is a game and this game is almost his life. For the Swede, it is. The card game, thus, like the hotel in being both heaven and hell, is both life and ironically literal a game of cards. And the “fat and painted kings and queens” of the following passage are symbolically those who blindly view life as a game without understanding the seriousness of this struggle between the elemental forces of life “waging above them,” or over their heads: “Of course the board had been overturned, and now the whole company of cards was scattered over the floor, where the boots of the men trampled the fat and painted kings and queens as they gazed with their silly eyes at the war that was waging above them” (302).

If at this point we turn for a moment from our consideration solely of man's nature as represented by the firewheel and the hotel to a look at his universe, the deterministic character of which is represented by the wind, it will be seen in what happens to these cards that this matter of awareness is of ultimate importance. For when Scully throws open the door to go out for the fight, these “fat and painted kings and queens” are “caught up from the floor and dashed helplessly against the farther wall” (304). And it is ultimately this fate which awaits the Swede, the least conscious and most instinctive of the characters, when he has been swept by the wind “as if he carried sails” (310) southward in the direction of town and the “low black railway station.” That it is the wind as fate or a vast, indifferent, deterministic force which drives man before it from the cradle to the grave, its wail at once a reminder of the one and a promise of the other, seems to be the implication of these lines also: “The entire prelude had in it a tragedy greater than the tragedy of action, and this aspect was accentuated by the long, mellow cry of the blizzard, as it sped the tumbling and wailing flakes into the black abyss of the south” (305). Or these: “The Easterner was startled to find that they were out in a wind that seemed to come direct from the shadowed arctic floes. He heard again the wail of the snow as it was flung to its grave in the south” (307). Here, in other words, is a spatial analogy for a life span, with birth not illogically represented in the white floe, or sheet of floating ice broken off and launched upon the sea, in the north and with death as the “black abyss” or “grave” in the south, the wind providing the wailing, irresistible connection between the two. And the fact that it is southward toward the station, which is all that can be seen of the town from the hotel, that the Swede is driven before the wind, and the fact that the station itself is described as “the low black railway station—which seemed incredibly distant” (304) supports this interpretation of the wind. Similarly, in these terms, it is possible to see in the following a symbolic microcosm of the main action of the story: “Scully threw open the door. Instantly a terrific wind caused the flame of the lamp to struggle at its wick, while a puff of black smoke sprang from the chimney-top” (303). Here in short is the whole story: the fated arrival of the Swede in a train drawn by a “snow-crusted engine” (286), the conflict between himself and his environment, and his sudden death. As suggested before, the emphasis upon black in its relation to the wind and the Swede is equally significant in terms of the previous contrast in awareness, Mr. White, the Easterner, at one pole and Mr. Black, the Swede, at the other. Thus, while it is “conceit,” the “very engine of life,” that spins this Swede, this firewheel, it is a deterministic force that flings it from white to black, from north to south, from birth to death.

That this deterministic force is indifferent to man's futile concepts of moral value, his “creeds … classes … [and] egotisms,” is implicit in the fact that the Swede was morally right: Johnnie was cheating. Yet it is the Swede who is swept into the “black abyss of the south”—not Johnnie, not the Easterner, who was aware that Johnnie was cheating and aware too of the graver issues in this conflict over the cards, and not the cowboy, who wanted to fight only through ignorance of the issues and the outcome. Support for this essentially amoral universe appears, furthermore, in a consistently meaningful play upon the valuative terms good and square. The fact that this play is also consistently ironic, often bitterly so, would suggest further that his naturalism did not come altogether naturally to Stephen Crane. Consider, for example, the deeper irony than that already discussed in the Easterner's cry: “‘What's the good of fighting over a game of cards?’” If instead of the literal leg, as before, we take this game to be the game of life, then the question is profoundly cynical—what, in other words, is the moral value to be found in life that is worth fighting for? More bitter still is the use of good in Scully's inquiry, “‘Are you any good yet, Johnnie?’” For the question here is what has been the use or value of Jesus Christ, and for an answer we have only the senseless death of the Swede. And it is also as a woeful instance of the cowboy's unawareness that an ironic interpretation of good affords us in this observation: “‘If the bartender had been any good,’ observed the cowboy thoughtfully, ‘he would have gone in and cracked that there Dutchman on the head with a bottle in the beginnin' of it and stopped all this here murderin'’” (316).

In the same way, Crane plays upon the word square in several ironically meaningful instances: in the Easterner's conclusion, for example, that “the Swede might not have been killed if everything had been square” (316). Also the judgment and the values of society are severely questioned in Fort Romper's opinion of the gambler as “the kind known as ‘square’” (312). Less meaningful but equally ironic is the insistence upon square in the pictures of the card players, who “formed a square, with the little board on their knees” (300) and who “sat close to the stove, and squared their knees under a wide board” (289). Perhaps, most meaningful of all is the Swede's lusty comment on the supper as he claps Scully “ruthlessly on the shoulder. ‘Well, old boy, that was a good, square meal’” (300). For since there is no surface irony here in that we have nothing to indicate that it wasn't a good meal and since all seven instances in which the word good is used in the story, as well as six of square, are ironic, it would seem safe to assume that there is an irony here too, the implication being that a full belly is the only criterion that can finally be depended upon as a means of knowing what is good and what is square.

To return now to the Swede, his nature as defined by the firewheel, one further essential aspect of his nature or condition that is to be found symbolically stated remains—his isolation. And it is from the blue of the heron's legs which causes it to “declare its position against any background” (286) that the initial association of this color with isolation is established. It is confirmed in the fact that the hotel or symbolic banhus, which is painted the same color, arouses only “shame, pity, and horror” (286) in the Easterners who pass through Fort Romper on the transcontinental express and who know only “the brown-reds and subdivisions of dark greens of the East” (286). Further, as a symbol, the color blue is developed exactly in the manner of the metaphysical conceit, objectifying and commenting on the relation of isolation to fear. For on two significant moments of crisis in the Swede's relation to the others the snow is described as blue also. For instance, when he is backing away, frightened by the whack the cowboy has given the board, Crane pauses in the account of the action to note that “through the windows could be seen the snow turning blue in the shadow of dusk” (291). In the same way, when he is going outside with the others for the fight and expresses his fear that all of them will “pitch on” him, it is again noted that “the covered land was blue with the sheen of an unearthly satin” (304). It is thus a part of the effectiveness of this symbol that it not only establishes this link between isolation and fear (blue and white) but also comments on this relation in that on both occasions cited above the Swede's fears are revealed by the action to be imaginary. The cowboy was not going to attack him; he only stretches “his long legs indolently” and “puts his hands in his pockets” (291); and he is not pitched on by the others—he fights only Johnnie. The comment, then, is to suggest a reciprocally causal relation: the fear is caused by the isolation as well as the isolation is caused by the fear. And the inability to communicate, which is the result of his isolation, is dramatically reinforced.

Since this isolation is an essential aspect of the Swede's relation to the others, or man's relation to society, in the same way that egocentrism is the essential feature of his inner nature represented by the stove, the two make up a contrast relationship like the others; but in being central or binding rather than additional, they would have to take their place on the firewheel as a blue rim and a yellow hub. Diagrammatically, then, the firewheel consists of a yellow hub, a blue rim, and the following spokes, successively related by a ribbon of contrast woven through the whole: white, fear, red, anger, snow, fire, red-brown and dark green, blue, East, West, civilized man, animal man, Scully as God, Scully as Satan, hotel as heaven, hotel as hell, Celtic and Roman warfare, modern warfare, life as a game, and life as eternal conflict. It is no wonder that the Swede in action “fizzes like a firewheel.” For seen thus, the firewheel becomes an alternate symbol, with the hotel, of man, as he exists in an amoral, deterministic universe, spinning with the contradictions of his nature and his past before the wind which flings him from north to south, from birth to death.

It remains now only to ask ourselves if this man, so defined, is the one who, in the Easterner's pseudo-naturalistic summation, shares in the responsibility for the Swede's death, when he says: “‘We are all in it! … Every sin is the result of collaboration. We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede’” (316). And our answer must be no, not really. For this man in this universe, as they are symbolically defined, is totally doomed; the Swede's death is the inevitable result of his condition—or his nature in his universe—so that none of the characters of the story, rather than all, may be said to be responsible. Consequently, the real strength, the ruthless honesty this story possesses is not to be found in the literal surface but in the symbolic substructure, where by means of a fictional method still denied to Crane—recently by Phillip Rahv—the author of “The Blue Hotel” has unmistakably contrived a complex but consistently related statement of a severely naturalistic Weltanschaung. And to supplement the beginning made by Stallman in his re-examination of Stephen Crane as a symbolic naturalist would seem to remain a much more urgent task for contemporary criticism than to argue with it, before the evidence is fully investigated.

Note

1. All page references are to R. W. Stallman, ed., Stephen Crane: Stories and Tales (Vintage Books, 1952).