SOURCE: Conder, John J. “Stephen Crane and the Necessary Fiction.” In Naturalism in American Fiction: The Classic Phase, pp. 22-42. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984.

[In the following essay, Condor outlines Stephen Crane's naturalistic vision in “The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel.”]

“THE OPEN BOAT”

“The Open Boat” is the center of the Crane canon and the appropriate work with which to begin a discussion of Crane's naturalism. In its brilliant starkness, the central image portrays a naturalistic vision of man. Men adrift in a boat, a human creation, confront the sea, the world of nature. Unwillingly they receive an education whose terms are understood mainly by the correspondent. The lessons he learns are central to Crane's naturalistic vision, and they emerge with remarkable clarity.

Although the correspondent would like to think of nature as having purpose, he is soon divested of that comforting illusion, for his repeated invocations to “the seven mad gods who rule the sea”¹ only lead him to a knowledge of her indifference. At first he “wishes to throw bricks at the temple” of nature to protest this injustice, but he can only settle for hating “deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.” He discovers nature is not symbolic, that man cannot think in teleological terms, even though the egocentricity of an endangered man makes him “desire to confront a personification” of some force in nature and, “with hands supplicant,” to beg, “‘Yes, but I love myself’” (85). No such personified force exists in Crane's nonanthropomorphic world. Still, the correspondent learns that if man's egocentricity can lead (and has led) to his creating gods to relieve the anxieties of his loneliness in the universe, it also can lead (and has led) to a more concrete reality, the creation of societies and ethical systems for the purpose of survival. The men in the boat, once safely ensconced in a steamer now wrecked, are in the original position of primitive man confronting a threatening nature. The common threat of nature gives rise to a miniature society, “the subtle brotherhood of men” (73) who cooperate out of a desire to survive, though self-preservation is not the only value offered by society. The correspondent does not wish to view the shark alone. Society also provides solace and morale to frightened men.

Moral and ethical systems have the same source as societies, indeed are indispensable to any society, for without them a society could not be self-regulative and would dissolve. Hence the story contains marked reference to ethics: “The ethics of their condition was decidedly against any open suggestion of hopelessness” (71). In short, to maintain morale becomes an ethical duty in the interest of self-preservation, and the repetition of the phrase “‘Will you spell me?’” (82, 86, 87) suggests that Crane is interested in depicting the sense of mutual obligation that arises in the face of a common danger, the source of that ethical system. The acceptance of such obligation, indeed, is explicitly stated: “The obligation of the man at the oars was to keep the boat headed so that the tilt of the rollers would not capsize her” (82).

The correspondent learns these lessons in origins not abstractly but from a lived experience that conveys to him the emotional value of the comradeship that society and ethics promote. The power of the experience dispells his former cynicism about men ashore and, in this special situation, makes “a distinction between right and wrong [seem] absurdly clear to him” (88). Of course the unambiguous moral stance at which he arrives is not a challenge to the story's naturalism, to its monistic view that man and nature are one. The brotherhood and cooperation that instantly spring into being are man's instinctive responses to a threatening natural world. Man's difference in nature may derive from his moral sense, but that sense is rooted in instinct, a faculty that man shares with other creatures. Man is different, but different from other things in nature.

If the men in the boat pitted against the sea permit the correspondent clarity of moral vision, a contrast between the primitive society in the boat and the advanced one on the shore prevents any hasty conclusion that the moral clarity that prevails in the first extends to the second, for a central aspect of the story is the distinction between the unusual conditions that prevail in the boat and those which commonly prevail ashore. Ultimately, those distinctions lead to a distinction between moral sensibilities as well.

Initially, the correspondent measures the difference in his own suffering flesh when he calls rowing “a diabolical punishment” rather than a social amusement (74). The advanced society of the shore, with its windmill, its “house of refuge”(76), its lighthouse, and its winter vacations, has developed beyond the point where physical exertion—in this case, rowing—is a necessity for survival; men ashore engage in such activities for mere sport, a fact that makes the correspondent lament that men cannot train for shipwrecks (74). So the physical distance between the protosociety of the boat and the society of the shore suggests a temporal one, depicting how much man's creation, society, has progressed beyond its original reason for existence, self-protection, and developed a life of its own that affects man's behavior so as to defy its primary reason for being. It is the diversions and pleasures offered by the shore society, after all, that lead the members of the winter resort hotel party thoughtlessly to assume that the men in the boat are enjoying their own pleasures.

This lesson in distance that the correspondent is so painfully learning implies another lesson both for him and the reader. If nature is indifferent and societies and their associated moral systems spring from man's instinct for survival, then societies are fictions in the sense that works of art are fictions—that is, creations of man designed to interpret the outside world in human terms, to give human meaning to a world without meaning and impose human order on a world whose natural order can be beneficent to man only if its destructive aspects are controlled. From the correspondent's perspective the shore is “set before him like a bit of scenery on a stage, and he looked at it and understood with his eyes each detail of it” (90). The equation between art (the stage scenery) and society suggests that society is an art form, a human organization of reality like art, and this equation is reinforced shortly thereafter, further promoting the view that society is a fiction: “The shore, with its white slope of sand and its green bluff, topped with little silent cottages, was spread like a picture before him. It was very near to him then, but he was impressed as one who in a gallery looks at a scene from Brittany or Holland” (91).

But Crane does something more than develop an equation between art and society. He endows his correspondent with aesthetic distance to make it clear that the latter is viewing art properly. Those who possess this faculty view the work of art in terms of its internal relations and refrain from establishing relations external to it; that is, they see the work as it is in itself without imposing practical values on it or establishing a personal relation with it that projects some part of the self or its experience onto it. And those who achieve aesthetic distance thus also achieve an understanding of the true meaning of the work, the word “distance” implying an intimate rather than a peripheral involvement.²

This is a faculty that Crane takes pains to show his correspondent in possession of. Readers who note his identification with the soldier of Algiers should also note that the identification is impersonal. A sense of shared situations, in short, prompts the development of aesthetic distance, with a consequent loss of self, rather than an identification that is simply external because it projects one man's personal responses onto those of another. Hence the correspondent dreams “of the slow and slower movements of the lips of the soldier”; and, losing all sense of personal self, becoming the soldier, he “was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers” (86).

Although he naturally feels a personal relationship to the shore once in the water (he does not want to drown), the pictorial references to it suggest that for two brief instances he views it as he viewed the soldier—that is, with aesthetic distance—and hence can perceive the true meaning and value of each art work: the shore signifying refuge, home, life; the soldier representing abandonment, homelessness, death. This is a dramatic reversal of his former view, an external one, in which “he had never regarded it [the soldier's dying] as important.” Indeed, “it was less to him than the breaking of a pencil's point” (85). On the shore, in society, he measured the value of everything in personal terms, and no experience prompted the development of aesthetic distance.

The problem with the people on the shore in this story is that they do not possess aesthetic distance. They view others in terms of external relations, projecting their own personal lighthearted mood onto the men in the boat, whom they view as engaging in sport like themselves. And this fact brings into bold relief the difference between the man who can view society as a fiction and with aesthetic distance and the man living within the fiction of his own creation. Immersed in the complications of an advanced society, social man forgets the original reasons for its existence and responds to other needs generated by that society—the “need,” for example, for diversion and pleasure. As creations of men, advanced societies are still fictions—that is, interpretations of nature—but such interpretations can lead to a loss of communication among men (as in the case between the boat's occupants and the shore's visitors) because they no longer have their source in primal instincts for survival. Rather, their source is in needs that engender an external view of other men rather than an internal (aesthetic) view.

If there seems to be an implied moral commentary in Crane's handling of his picture motif, it should be clear by now that neither this commentary nor the correspondent's clear moral vision constitutes a flat judgment of man's moral failings. For the exercise of aesthetic distance in viewing paintings does indeed require a proper physical distance from the work, distance that is denied social man caught in the complicated social fabric (in this case, living within the world viewed as art by the correspondent). That lack of distance is certainly a circumstance mitigating the responsibility of the men on the shore who do not perceive the dangerous situation of the boat's occupants. Although the correspondent undoubtedly wishes urgently that someone could see him and his partners from the windtower, the tower is, after all, a windmill, not “a life-saving station.” Crane takes care to point out somewhat earlier “that there was not a life-saving station within twenty miles in either direction, but the men did not know this fact and in consequence they made dark and opprobrious remarks concerning the eyesight of the nation's life-savers” (76). In short, what may seem indefensible to the men in the boat does not appear so to the reader, for there is no reason to believe that the operators of this windmill have had knowledge of repeated shipwrecks in their vicinity and ought therefore to use the structure as a post to spot survivors. The complexity of shore life suggests that the simple contrast between the human moral realm of the boat and the amoral world of nature (the sea) underscores a larger, more complicated contrast between the situations of the men in the boat and those on the shore.

The contrast is introduced by the windtower, a human creation harnessing the wind. This structure represents two things to the correspondent: “nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men” (88). “Nature in the wind” is an odd phrase, for wind is a part of nonhuman nature; but the phrase aptly describes nature as seen by the snow man in Wallace Stevens's poem. Paraphrased, “The Snow Man” means that “one must have a mind of winter” (that is, be a snow man) in order to comprehend nature as it is in itself without imposing on it human perceptions and emotions. “Nature in the wind” is thus whatever nonhuman nature is in itself. In the vision of men, “she” (nature) is, among other things, “flatly indifferent,” at least from the perspective of the correspondent. No snow man, he inevitably personifies when he describes nature. But his reference to “men” in the phrase “nature in the vision of men” seems to involve more than himself and suggests that he also includes nature as seen by the eyes of those who created the windtower. It is unlikely that they share the correspondent's feeling that nature is “flatly indifferent” to man, for it has taken a shipwreck for the correspondent to reach this conclusion. But no matter what their views of nature's essential character, they know that they can harness the wind's energies and make it serve man's purposes: to generate electricity, to drain water, and the like. To use nature in this way is to “interpret” nature—to impose on it a significance which it does not in itself possess.

In the vision of men, then, the windtower represents (indifferent) nature forced to serve the human world of purpose, and this point establishes an important, clear difference between the situation of the men on the shore and that of the men in the boat. Although the world of the shore developed from a simple society symbolized by the men in the boat, it has achieved a degree of freedom from the primitive struggle for existence that permits it to make relatively sophisticated interpretations of nature, of which the windtower is one example. Such a degree of freedom is denied the men in the boat. Their perspective on their immediate lives is sharply limited by their physical struggle to remain afloat. The first line of the story stresses the limitation of that perspective: “None of them knew the color of the sky” (68). But when they reach the safety of the shore, their perspective is no longer so limited: “When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters” (92).

After their venture they are released from the struggle for existence to reenter a world of interpreters. They can continue to interpret according to their own respective professions and thus contribute to society's fictional structure. Because of his changed situation, the correspondent can now interpret nature in a far more sophisticated way than when in the boat. The specific background of this story—Crane lived through such an adventure as a correspondent and wrote a journalistic account of the shipwreck that forced him into an open boat—permits a critic to merge character and author by saying that the story is the form the correspondent-author's interpretation takes. And the story's meaning involves a moral view of life achieved by him. But though the correspondent may have achieved a measure of clarity of moral vision as one consequence of his being thoroughly subjected to natural forces, few on the shore have been in a position to arrive at his perspective. The fundamental contrast between the situations of the two societies suggests that one has lost access to truths momentarily permitted the other. It takes a brush with death for the correspondent to arrive at his vision.

The lack of clarity of moral vision ashore derives from social complexity. The simplicity of an opposition between man and nature in “The Open Boat” becomes, in Crane's other work, the complexity of the opposition between man and society. The boat becomes an individual, floating in a sea that is society, and the complexities of this changed opposition lead to determinism. Subsequent analyses will show that there are many reasons for this difference in philosophical vision, but two can be offered here as germane to “The Open Boat.” The first is that when the sea becomes society, the sharp contrast between the individual and the sea (as nonhuman nature) is lost, for the character can be viewed both as a representative of society and as an individual apart from it. A blurring of the distinction between the individual in his role as individual and in his role as social man—as oiler, correspondent, and the like—already exists in “The Open Boat,” but the critical situation permits instinct to form that brotherhood which leads in the direction of clear moral vision. On the shore—that is, in the societies portrayed in Crane's other works—this blurred distinction undoes moral vision and questions the concept of freedom. When the individual is reduced to the status of social man, a product of society's values, his choices appear as determined as the self that makes them.

A related, and broader, reason for the determinism of the other works lies in the central implication of Crane's view of society as a fiction, a creation of man's, as is a work of art. The implication is that society is not founded on an absolute, and therefore man lives in that world of right and wrong to which the correspondent refers, rather than in a world of good and evil. And distinctions between right and wrong are less easy to perceive than those between good and evil. This is so because good and evil are founded in an absolute outside of man, access to which religions have traditionally provided. In a world of right and wrong society's values replace those of God, and the merits of social values are frequently questionable. And without an absolute, individuals have no way of distancing themselves from such values by measuring them according to God's. Hence they more easily become their unconscious product rather than their autonomous wielders.

Right and wrong, furthermore, are ultimately founded in man's instinctively felt need to survive. In a simple social situation like that of the boat, instinct to survive easily creates a sense of the right and leads to brotherhood because all the men can readily enough perceive the common threat posed by the sea. Such a shared perception makes absurdly clear the moral demands of brotherhood, cooperation, and obligation. But the social situation of the shore is far more complicated. There the individual still has an instinct to survive, and his place in society limits his perspective just as surely as the sea limits the perspective of the boat's occupants. But in society individuals do not necessarily have shared, if limited, perceptions of that pressing common danger which evokes brotherhood on the boat. Nor do they have a substitute, a shared objective absolute to which all can give allegiance and thus temper their instincts and improve their moral visions. In society brotherhood and cooperation break down as men fight men rather than the sea, and the breakdown occurs precisely because men are at the mercy of their instincts and their conflicting, limited perceptions. The one is a function of biological and psychological conditions over which they have no control; the other, their perceptions, a function of social conditions that they are equally powerless to control. When perception is the condition for right action, and when it is reducible to circumstance beyond individual control, then a clear moral vision permitting judgment of characters gives way to a deterministic one.

“THE BLUE HOTEL”

A deterministic element in “The Open Boat” exists to show that man's roots are in the natural world, and this view is intrinsic to the naturalistic vision. Man cooperates and develops a sense of mutual obligation—these are his instinctive responses to his condition, the common threat to survival, what Crane calls “the plight of the ants” (88). Thus his moral codes derive from a nature that embraces men as well as ants, both of which cooperate and form societies. Of course Crane uses the reference to the ants ironically—the men are as insignificant as ants sub specie aeternitatis—but the ironic mode is not simplistic, and the reference contains both values.

Man, of course, is “different”: he can interpret, impose meanings on the world, and this ability separates him from the ants, although his difference is still rooted in nature. Yet this latter aspect of the story, its biological determinism, does not raise determinism as a serious philosophical issue. For though men possess instincts, like other creatures in the natural world, this fact does not mean that they do not also possess freedom over and above those determinisms which wed them to nature. It is in “The Blue Hotel” that the issue is raised in serious fashion by the concluding interchange between the Easterner and the cowboy.

This interchange is marked by the spirit of “might-have-been.” The Swede might be alive, according to the cowboy, had the bartender “been any good” and “cracked that there Dutchman on the head with a bottle” (169), or had the Swede not been “an awful fool,” even “crazy” (170).³ The Easterner initially responds “tartly” that “a thousand things might have happened” (169), as if to suggest that it is pointless to think in might-have-been terms, but it soon becomes clear that he shares the same spirit, for he cries out, “The Swede might not have been killed if everything had been square”(170). He rejects the cowboy's view, which holds the Swede largely responsible for his own death, and instead involves five men (other than the Swede) in a “collaboration” issuing in a “sin,” the killing (170). “Collaboration” and “sin” are words that introduce a moral factor into the spirit of might-have-been, a factor which holds men responsible for their actions and thus presupposes their freedom.

But there is an interesting ambiguity in the sad phrase memorialized by Whittier, for “might-have-been” can mean “could have been under the same conditions” or “would have been if conditions had been altered.” Applied to the Easterner's behavior, the phrase can thus mean that, in the lived moment of the action, the Easterner could have corroborated the Swede's charges under prevailing conditions; or it can mean that he would have corroborated those charges if—if, for example, he could have foreseen the Swede's death. Furthermore, although the Easterner applies this ambiguous phrase only to the Swede's death (“The Swede might not have been killed if everything had been square”), simple logic demands that it be applied to the conditional clause as well. If it is true that the Swede might not have been killed if everything had been square, then the reader must conclude that the Easterner feels that everything might have been square. And since he implicates in this collaboration not just himself and Johnnie (who knew of the cheating) but Scully and the cowboy (who did not), a reader must assume that the Easterner believes that all the actions performed by these men in the story might have been different.

This ambiguous phrase thus embraces all the events through section viii of the story, but which of its meanings applies? Insofar as the Easterner is moral in his point of view, one must assume that he adopts a could-have-been interpretation, for the concept of moral responsibility is drained of value if men under the same conditions cannot act other than as they do. Curiously enough, however, Crane does not put words into the Easterner's mouth that could clarify this matter. Instead, he seems deliberately to obfuscate. “Sin” and “collaboration” suggest a could-have-been interpretation, but to say that “every sin is the result of a collaboration” (170, italics added) suggests a would-have-been reading. “Result” is a mathematical term denoting a closed system in which human intention is not a factor. Try as one will, two plus three will not equal six. Since this “collaboration” could not have been purposeful (the Easterner did not withhold confirmation of the Swede's charges to assure the Swede's death), the would-have-been interpretation of the Easterner's remarks is strengthened. Because one can argue that the Easterner would have acted differently if he could have foreseen the future, one is left with a plausible “would-have-been” interpretation of his remarks, an interpretation that is perfectly consistent with determinism, the thesis that states that “for everything that ever happens there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could happen.”⁴ From this angle of vision the “sin” is indeed the “apex of a human movement” (170) which represents the condition for its occurrence, though no single person premeditated its commission.

If the Easterner's concluding remarks do not clarify the meaning of “might-have-been,” neither does the story's structure; for it also fails to give unambiguous sanction to either a moral or a deterministic meaning for events. Section viii, for example, seems to indict the community for hypocrisy in tolerating a gambler because he is “so judicious in his choice of victims” (166) and because, apart from his gambling, he is in all other matters “so generous, so just, so moral, that, in a contest, he could have put to flight the consciences of nine-tenths of the citizens of Romper” (167). One can argue that this indictment strengthens the story's moral vision by extending the scope of the Easterner's. Clearly, if the Swede was in the gambler's company because of the moral failing of five men, the gambler was in his company because of a community's moral failure.

The “moral” vision of section viii, however, is counterbalanced by foreshadowings within the tale at odds with a moral interpretation because they strengthen a deterministic reading. The Swede early in the story predicts his own death; and indeed, he meets it. He is killed by a gambler who, like Johnnie, the first gambler he encounters, preys on reckless farmers: a nice bit of literary symmetry suggesting that the agent of the Swede's death is not far removed from the social context in which he feared meeting it. Out of a sense of frustration, Scully and the cowboy fervently wish the Swede's death, and their wish is fulfilled through no conscious effort on their part. And the cash machine message on which the Swede's eyes stare—“‘This registers the amount of your purchase’” (169)—can certainly be read as a confirmation of deterministic forces, rather than human free will, guiding events. If it recalls the ancient adage “As a man soweth, so shall he reap,” the moral value of that adage is drained by the closed system of mathematics the message represents. The Swede does not intend his actions to produce his death, but they do.

Of course, one might argue that these deterministic elements are only ironic, but if one deprives them of deterministic intent on that basis, one can use the same argument to deprive section viii of moral intent. It is only ironic that men who think themselves moral should tolerate, even approve of, this gambler who preys on old farmers; for nowhere does the narrator suggest that such “moral” citizens could behave other than as they do, a view that is the necessary adjunct of the moral one. Their behavior thus becomes but another instance of the cosmic irony of the human situation.

In these ways one can see that Crane has created, in his story at large, the same kind of tension between the moral and the deterministic that surfaces in the Easterner's “fog of mysterious theory.” In order to resolve that tension in favor of a moral reading, therefore, one must find somewhere within the story the indispensable premise on which a moralist reading rests. One must be able to see that men could have acted other than as they did under the same conditions; one must be able to aver that Crane wishes “might-have-been” to mean “could-have-been.”

Testing the validity of this premise requires that the reader review events from two perspectives, that of ignorance and that of knowledge; that is, from a perspective that views events as they are lived without the Easterner's knowledge that Johnnie is cheating and without an advance knowledge that the Swede will be killed, and from a perspective that views the lived events with such knowledge. There is a difference between one's perception of events as they are lived and as they are viewed in retrospect. The Easterner may, in hindsight, impose elements upon the past that were not there in the lived moment. So, too, might a reader. Indeed, the major point that emerges from an examination of these two perspectives is that Crane seems deliberately to undercut a clear moral axis for the first seven sections by concealing the reasons for characters' actions at crucial moments. If one doesn't know why characters behave as they do, it is clearly hard to say whether they could have behaved otherwise, and by so much is a moral interpretation weakened.

In the lived moment and from the point of view of ignorance, the action poses one moral issue, and its center is the Easterner's response to the Swede's initial appeal for help. When the Swede's “appealing glance” is met only with the Easterner's “I don't understand you,” the reader, who learns shortly that the Easterner in fact does understand the source of the Swede's anxieties, might very well be tempted to view this failure of brotherhood in moral terms. The reader also might be tempted to moral judgment of the Easterner from the perspective of knowledge, which raises the only other moral issue involving the Easterner, his failure to corroborate what he knows to be the truth of the Swede's charge of cheating. But from either perspective, that of ignorance or that of knowledge, several factors inhibit moral judgment of the Easterner. The major one is that the reader has no access to the Easterner's thought processes. Although in the first case he engages in “prolonged and cautious reflection” (146) before he responds to the Swede, the reader does not know the content of his thought that leads him to respond as he does. Is he thinking, “I should help this Swede, but I can't be bothered to become involved,” a thought which would invite moral condemnation? Or does his thought undermine the possibility of moral judgment, as the following might: “I believe I know what's wrong with this fellow, but I am not certain; and I am afraid if I try to help, I shall only make matters worse”?

In the second case also, Crane deprives the reader of access to the Easterner's thought, and with the same effect. No matter what else the reader learns about the Easterner—that he does not find a game of cards worth a fight, for example, or that he feels sufficiently moved for the underdog in a fight that he cheers for Johnnie, the card cheat—he never learns the cause of the Easterner's “sin” of omission. And in both cases, Scully's own experience with the Swede further weakens a moral charge against the Easterner, whether leveled by the reader or by the Easterner himself. Scully's attempt to calm the Swede compensates for the Easterner's initial failure, and it backfires disastrously. So even “moral” behavior can lead to disaster. The upshot of Scully's good intentions thus rivets the reader's attention on the ironic operations of cause and effect rather than on the moral delinquencies of men. As for the Easterner's other “failure,” one can conclude that any argument premised on the view that the Easterner has a moral duty to corroborate the Swede's charge can be countered by an argument that corroboration would be an inflammatory act in a rapidly deteriorating situation. An Easterner who has witnessed a change for the worse in the Swede's behavior (effected by Scully's good intentions) could very well believe that silence is the best moral response under the circumstances.

Denied access to the Easterner's thoughts, the reader can find no clear moral axis in events that might yield one. And without such access, how can a reader accept the moral legitimacy of the Easterner's self-recriminations at the story's end? If he has forgotten the common psychological phenomenon of individuals experiencing irrational guilt after an unhappy event, he can recall that after Scully's benevolent intentions fail, “the others understood from his manner that he was admitting his responsibility for the Swede's new viewpoint”(155). If Scully can experience irrational guilt for the Swede's aggressive behavior, might not the Easterner be so responding to a consequence far more serious? This question can be answered with another: Would the Easterner have felt guilty had the Swede not died, the murderer not been imprisoned? Perhaps he should feel guilty, but nothing in the story allows the reader to corroborate his feeling in fact. All that the reader can say with certainty is that in both “moral” events, the Easterner's apparent failure is in character—character here defined not necessarily as “indifferent” but as “reflective.” The Easterner refuses to act without weighing the consequences of such action. To an outsider he may seem indifferent to the point of moral negligence, but that is only speculation.

There is no reason to believe, however, that Johnnie was not cheating. Certainly the contrast between his ne'er-do-well self and the respectable brother whose picture Scully shows the Swede with pride would make little literary sense were he not a cheat, and the symmetry created by one card cheat's carrying out the doom sensed by the Swede in the presence of an earlier one would be lost. Nonetheless it is risky to pin one's hopes for a clear moral axis on the fact that Johnnie cheated. For just as Crane denies the reader access to the Easterner's thoughts at crucial points, he does the same with Johnnie at one crucial moment of the lived action. The reader does not know why Johnnie cheats in a card game not played for money—a fact stressed by the cowboy in conclusion. Is he just keeping in shape for future card rivals? Is he trying, in a petty way, to get back at the Swede for the Swede's patently offensive behavior? A reader cannot know. He only knows that it is in character for Johnnie to do so.

From both perspectives, then, the only characters on whom one might pin a moral reading thwart efforts to do so because they conceal their thoughts, and so their motives. Or rather, of course, Crane conceals them, thereby clearly and significantly reversing the relationship between character and behavior that prevails in prose fiction with a moral axis. In such novels the primary function of behavior is to reveal character; that is, to display growth, development, or other change, or their lack. In “The Blue Hotel,” Crane turns the horse and cart around, making character type explain behavior. It clearly is “in character” for a reflective Easterner to ruminate and it is “in character” for a ne'er-do-well to cheat. But their moral status is not clear.

Indeed, this very lack of clarity makes moral readings of the tale illogical. That moral failure to be brotherly which more than one critic finds is the central meaning of the story does at first seem plausible as its major point, all the more so because the Easterner's theory seems to embrace it and because it has a certain reasonableness alluded to earlier: had the Easterner, or others, handled the Swede differently, the Swede might not have been where he was to provoke a gambler who responded as he did. But a moment's reflection shows that the story points to the problems—better, the impossibility—of translating this thought into a moral indictment. Scully's brotherly gestures worsen matters, so moral behavior is no panacea. Furthermore, to sustain a moral reading, one must force the Swede to share guilt for his death. Good reason there may be for his behavior (he is a victim of paranoia bred by his reading of dime novels), but there is also good reason for Scully's later fury; namely, the behavior of the Swede. Because Scully does not know the merit of the Swede's charge against his son, his frustration must be put in the same “moral” category as the Swede's paranoia. If Scully must be blamed, therefore, so must the Swede. For that matter, so must everybody else not named by the Easterner, for to sustain a moralist reading, finally, one must honor the “moral” vision of section viii and brand the community that harbored the gambler. And so one arrives at the moral of a moralist reading: If everyone behaved like angels, there would be no killings and no prisons. It is difficult to believe that a writer widely hailed as a “psychological realist” would have taken the trouble to convey such a truism.

Why, then, if there is no clear moral axis in the first seven sections, does Crane introduce moral perspectives in the last two? The apparently moral perspectives of the narrator in section viii and of the Easterner in ix seem more like deliberately planned additions to the story to impale the reader on the horns of what can be called the Hobbesian dilemma:⁵ man is free and can be judged morally, but his acts of the will are caused, a fact that undercuts the premise on which moral judgment is based—that under the same conditions individuals could behave other than as they do.

It is Crane's emphasis on types, on what he early in the story refers to as “creeds, classes,[and] egotisms” (142), that initially challenges that premise. The story shows that an individual's character type is one of the conditions governing behavior, a fact that makes nonsense of the idea that under the same conditions a character could act other than as he does. Perhaps so, but then he would be a different character! And as the story develops, one sees the challenge to this premise strengthened, for another dimension of character that acts as cause emerges: its elemental nature. The story presents character as type defined by class or creed and character as animallike in its egotism. Indeed, in this story, these two aspects of character become inseparable, and this twin emphasis resolutely turns the Hobbesian definition of liberty (“the absence of all the impediments to action that are not contained in the nature and intrinsical quality of the agent”)⁶ into a deterministic vision.

In order to see that both aspects of character operate as conditions that govern behavior, the reader must be aware of how thoroughly Crane blurs the distinction between the human and the nonhuman worlds. He does this primarily by presenting the story as though it were a scientific experiment, the subject of which is human responses. The unusual color of the hotel, blue, suggests its role as a laboratory where the experimental scientist blends the “creeds, classes, egotisms, that streamed through Romper on the rails day after day.” Those, like the Easterner, who came from “the brown-reds and the subdivisions of the dark greens of the East” had “no color in common” with the “opulence and splendor” of the hotel—or so the reader is told (142). But Crane's naturalistic vision manipulates color to show that even a sophisticated Easterner is, finally, a part of nature and can be viewed as such in a laboratory.

The first hint of this comes from the particular colors that this color-conscious author chooses to emphasize in his story. The East is equated with brown-red and dark green; the West, with blue. Red, green, and blue-violet are primary colors—not the pigment primaries of the painter, to be sure, but the light primaries of the physicist, more appropriate to the perspective of the narrator as that of a detached scientist. To understand the narrator's “scientific findings,” however, the reader must ignore Crane's choice of brown-red and his omission of violet as the tone of his blue. Eastern subdivisions, after all, are not fire-engine red, and it would be awkward to call the story “The Blue-Violet Hotel.” Granting Crane this privilege, the reader can see that Crane deliberately reduces regions and the particular “creeds, classes, egotisms” that they breed to color; he blends together in the hotel not the subtractive primaries of the painter, which combine to produce black, but the additive primaries of the physicist—red, green, and blue—whose blending produces white.⁷ So the characters do, after all, share a “color in common.” White, furthermore, is the color (really noncolor) of the snowstorm, and so blending these character-colors together equates all of them with the world of physical nature—even the Easterner, despite his civilized veneer. Crane, indeed, emphasizes the sophisticated Easterner's association with physical nature. His name is Blanc, French for white. And Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, is eternally covered with glaciers and snow, a fact that inspired Coleridge and Shelley and very likely Crane as well.

But the story is named “The Blue Hotel,” and Crane gives equal emphasis to that color to make the point that man is a part of nature. The hotel's color seems to set it apart not just from the world of the East but, by its sharp contrast to the white of the snowstorm, from the world of physical nature as well. But the blue is also associated with physical nature, for it covers the snow with its “unearthly satin” (158); thus, the human creation—the hotel—and nature share a common color, suggesting that the division between the two worlds of man and nature is tenuous at best. Furthermore, people grow blue when they are cold and, though the hotel is supposed to protect them from this condition, it is in this very blue hotel that temperaments so commingle as to force them into the world of nature that will make them blue.

Crane's use of color, then, partly translates into a philosophical meaning akin to Ishmael's final speculations in the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” in Moby-Dick (chapter 42). Colors may distinguish one type of man from another type, and they indeed seem to separate man from the world of nature, which is snow-white-colorless. But in fact the human world represented by color is part of the continuum of nature because the whiteness of nature contains all colors—if the mixing of the colors produces white, the colors are in the white. Or, as Ishmael puts it, whiteness is not just “the visible absence of color” but is “at the same time the concrete of all colors.” Hence, nature and man are one, not two, in “The Blue Hotel.”

If the usual distinctions between the human and nonhuman worlds ultimately collapse, then one can legitimately examine human responses as a biologist examines the responses of birds or bullocks. And Crane's narrator does exactly that. His investigation shows that character operates as condition in both its social and its animal dimensions. In other words, the narrator's angle of vision is Hobbesian, and that angle of vision issues in a Hobbesian view of freedom because it views man's civilized self, with its “freedom,” in the same way that it views man's animal nature. Initially the emphasis falls on character type—that is, social type—as one important condition that causes certain emotional responses and leads to certain characteristic actions.

He introduces the Swede's first paranoid response, one that has its conditions: his foreignness, the locale, and his familiarity with the clichés of dime novels. And that paranoid response acts as the condition sparking the initial responses of others, differing types responding in different ways to one condition. Thus, the action that unfolds in the opening sections seems perfectly reasonable—“reasonable” in the sense of explicable and plausible rather than rational. Each character seems to have good reason to behave as he does, given his respective type. But by the end of section vii the reader can perceive that beneath the different types a common “savagery” emerges, though the expression of that violent emotional response again varies with the character type. That is, some people are more civilized than others and require greater external provocation before becoming like their fellow animals—before becoming, that is, creatures of instinct and emotion rather than creatures of a social class. Section vii ends with the cowboy and Scully vying in expressions of frustration as they repeat how they would like to kill the Swede, though Scully's stronger ethical sense prevents the cowboy from taking him on. The Easterner does not participate in section vii's verbal orgy, but he is hardly exempt from the emotional responses there expressed. For that section's marked emphasis on savage responses prepares for the final and most important response in the story, the Easterner's in section ix. It is there that his place in nature, and so in Crane's laboratory experiment, becomes apparent.

The Easterner's “fog of mysterious theory” seems to proceed naturally from the reasoned and reflective character type assigned him earlier, a type in marked contrast to others in the work. But the cowboy's protestations against the Easterner's assertion, “The Swede might not have been killed if everything had been square” (170), “reduced him [the Easterner] to rage.” He is no more exempt from frustration than the cowboy, as the following words indicate: “‘You're a fool!’ cried the Easterner viciously” (emphasis provided, 170). He is enraged by the cowboy's obtuseness, and his rage proceeds from a sense of guilt generated by a knowledge of the conclusion of his encounter with the Swede. This “fog of mysterious theory,” then, hardly possesses a rational base, and in his desire to relieve himself of the anguish of guilt, the Easterner dilutes it by imposing it on four others as well. It would be logical, of course, to blame the Swede, too; indeed, the whole community, which supported the “unfortunate gambler” whose action of killing the Swede is “the apex of a human movement” (170). But such logic would only be for one not caught in the throes of guilt. Where everyone is guilty, no one is, and the Easterner's guilt feelings are too intense to allow for their complete dissipation. But their very intensity also demands that they be shared. Hence, though he observes that “usually there are from a dozen to forty women really involved in every murder” (a comment that suggests that guilt can be widely distributed to the point where the concept becomes meaningless), he acknowledges his own felt guilt by implicating himself and just four others in the killing.

Seen in the lived moment of action, hence, the story contains a psychological determinism dependent on character type. Psychic states determine not just the obvious emotional responses of a simple cowboy who shrieks “Kill him” during the fight but also the apparently reasoned concluding observations of the sophisticated Easterner. But viewing events in retrospect, the reader is forced to the determinism that is part of the Easterner's theory, that historical determinism which describes every sin as the “apex of a human movement,” a determinism that is the natural complement of the psychological; for indeed any present moment is “the apex of a human movement” in a past in which men's behavior is a function of conditions then prevailing.

These two ways of witnessing the action show that the Easterner both is and is not Crane's spokesman. The moral aspect of his theory is false because it involves only five men as collaborators in a “sin.” But because his theory embraces both the moral and the deterministic, thereby reducing “sin” to a “result,” “the apex of a human movement,” his theory in broad outline does indeed represent the story's preferred philosophical vision. For the Easterner forces the reader to think in two sets of opposed terms, and so does Crane, who structures his story to embody a classic modern vision expressed by the Easterner, the Hobbesian paradox that undoes liberty with causation. That human movement whose apex is the Swede's death may be the result of characters performing “freely-willed” actions, but each action is reducible to conditions over which the character has no control. This paradox is the source of richness in “The Blue Hotel” and moves it resolutely in the direction of determinism. More important, the clear surfacing of the Hobbesian paradox in this, one of Crane's late works, suggests that his earlier works contain a dual vision that is responsible for such thoroughly incompatible interpretations of them.

Notes

1. Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat,” in Tales of Adventure, edited by Fredson Bowers with an introduction by J. C. Levenson. The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, edited by Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1970) 5: 77, 81, 84. Page references to this edition will appear in parentheses in my text. References to other works by Crane will be from the University of Virginia Edition hereafter cited, where appropriate and with volume number and publication date, as Va.

2. Frank Bergon also comments on the correspondent's “disinterested vision” (p. 61), but his view of the story's ending denies the correspondent a formulated education and so denies the story much intellectual meaning (p. 93): Stephen Crane's Artistry (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1975).

3. Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel,” in Tales of Adventure, Va. (1970) 5.

4. Richard Taylor, “Determinism,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards, ed. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. and The Free Press, 1967), 2:359.

5. The care Crane took in writing the story supports this view. See J. C. Levenson, in Tales of Adventure, The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, ed. Fredson Bowers, 5:xcviii.

6. Works of Thomas Hobbes 4:273.

7. On the various classes of primary colors and the results of their blending, see Faber Birren, Principles of Color: A Review of Past Traditions and Modern Theories of Color Harmony (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969), p. 22.

“The Open Boat”

My analysis should in part be read against the background of Marston LaFrance's view of the story as a paradigm of a clear moral vision existing in all of Crane's world: A Reading of Stephen Crane (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 196; pp. 195-205 for a full analysis emphasizing the word “moral.” Much of my opposition to his view depends on my point that the world of the boat is emphatically different from the world of the shore. This point suggests one major difference between my approach and another parallel to it in its emphasis on the value of community. Although Robert Shulman acknowledges the complexities of shore life, he thinks the worlds are not radically different and that the story points to “the possibilities implicit but usually concealed in ordinary life”: see his “Community, Perception, and the Development of Stephen Crane: From The Red Badge to ‘The Open Boat,’” American Literature 50 (November 1978): 455. Because his article is also a (valuable) response to critics who see the story as “undermining … man's mind, character, and language in an epistemologically absurd universe” (450-51), he does not capture the depths of the correspondent's education.

My view that the story exposes society as a fiction, a creation of man's in a godless world, makes Milne Holton's remarks on Crane's larger world view relevant: Cylinder of Vision: The Fiction and Journalistic Writing of Stephen Crane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1972), esp. pp. 13-14.

“The Blue Hotel”

James Trammell Cox's reading of “The Blue Hotel” as a “total conceit” (p. 148) issuing in determinism will remain a classic specimen of this approach to the story: “Stephen Crane as Symbolic Naturalist: An Analysis of ‘The Blue Hotel,’” Modern Fiction Studies 3 (Summer 1957): 147-58. The very comprehensiveness of his approach to what is a short story makes it inevitable that we use some of the same features of the story and employ a couple of similar critical points, but we interpret these features and use these points in very different ways to arrive at our shared conclusion that the story is indeed deterministic. The sheer number and complexity of the contrasts and parallels Cox draws in transforming the story's disparate elements into a spinning “firewheel” (158) set our treatments apart.

In spite of its comprehensiveness, however, his approach fails to persuade for at least two reasons. First, he does not develop the blurring of the human and animal kingdoms in the person of the Easterner, leaving the point made in a general statement (152). But the major problem is that in one essential regard Cox fails to see any blurring at all. His sense of determinism depends heavily on the wind, but he interprets the wind as a deterministic force of the nonhuman world, though invading the human world symbolized by the card game. Hence the deterministic wind is really a “fate or a vast, indifferent … force” (155) external to man. Such a separation between worlds, of course, easily leads to the moralist reading of a Marston LaFrance, who finds that “man's moral world and external nature's pointless energy are as sharply distinct in this story as elsewhere in Crane's work”: Reading of Crane, p. 221. It also may be behind Donald Gibson's view that critics who find determinism in the story “have little more than the weather to point to as proof of their claim”: The Fiction of Stephen Crane (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1968), p. 110.

Of course, the appearance of ethical choice has also been seen as a factor denying the story's determinism, even by Max Westbrook, who states that “the relation of Crane's characters to society … is not properly described as either ‘black’ determinism or ‘white’ free will, but rather as a ‘grey struggle’”: “Stephen Crane: The Pattern of Affirmation,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 14 (December 1959): 220. But he denies that Crane “took up” social determinism and thinks the fact that Johnnie cheats and that the Easterner fails to corroborate the fact “militate against concluding that ethical failure is inevitable or that ethical failure is blamed exclusively on circumstance”: “Stephen Crane's Social Ethic,” American Quarterly 14 (Winter 1962): 590. My definition of determinism and its application to the story are designed to counter such views.