One way to look at “The Blue Hotel” is as a companion piece—a mirror image if you will—of another highly regarded work of short fiction by the author most celebrated for The Red Badge of Courage. “The Open Boat” is generally regarded to stand alongside “The Blue Hotel” as the twin apexes of Crane’s short story canon. “The Open Boat” is a story about the cold indifference of nature to the concerns of mankind and the vital need for cooperation and collaboration between people to combat the incontestable chaos routinely visited upon the world by Mother Nature.
A blizzard rages outside the titular inn within the pages of “The Blue Hotel” and its walls and ceiling offer more than enough protection and yet, despite this, chaos reigns with a force not even reckoned with the four shipwreck survivors who briefly call the open boat home. The chaos that is unleashed inside with the arrival of three strangers who happen to be debark the train passing through the small Nebraska town home to the hotel cannot therefore by attributed to the inexplicable randomness of nature. The chaos here is man-made and yet even by the end of the story the swift and violent justice meted out remains equally inexplicable. The story offers consequence not fully connected to effect. In fact, the lack of connection is remarkable considering the time frame in which it was written. Less remarkable, perhaps, is that so many periodicals decided to give a pass on the story. Either the universally recognized qualities that make it a classic today somehow went unnoticed by editors not without a track record of proven insight or they absolutely recognized its greatness while also realizing it was too far ahead of its time to satisfy their readers.
More likely is a third option: whether great literature or not and whether too experimental in mood and tone or not, one thing is certain about “The Blue Hotel.” A great many readers are going to reach the end convinced that its author’s pessimistic worldview verges on the pathological. To be sure, it is difficult to find any sense of romanticized hope for a better world here, but wait a little bit and it pops up to discerning readers in “The Open Boat.” Meanwhile, the reader must tread carefully through a text containing narrative assertions such as the engine of life is the “conceit of man” ends with the image of a cowboy—that most iconically laconic of Americans—crying out blindly into the “fog of mysterious theory.”
A main character dies in “The Open Boat” as a sacrifice to prove the point that working toward the greater good of the many is preferable to everyone looking out only for themselves. A major character dies—well, actually, is murdered—in “The Blue Hotel” as the result of every other character looking out only for himself. The man who wrote “The Open Boat” should hardly be worthy of being termed pathologically pessimistic. That story which is ultimately optimistic in tone is the work of a journalist who became a subject of his biggest scoop transforming that historical event into a work of semi-autobiographical fiction. “The Blue Hotel” is predominantly a work of imagination. The story of man working together to save each other in a lifeboat was informed by experience while the story distinctly different in tone and mood about the possibility for anarchy to rule and govern is speculative and serves as a warning.
Every character is acting out of a sense of self-regard and self-interest; even when that self-interest is disguised as protecting one of the others. Many critics have noted that “The Blue Hotel” is not just a story about things being out of sync, but that the narrative itself—the telling of the tale—somehow seems to be a little off. While the events are hardly complicated, the way they each connect to each other to form what seems like a perfectly legitimate case of cause and effect is remarkably complex and complicated and even, perhaps, utterly inexplicable. While various theories are afforded both within the text and by those interpreting it as to the motivations or psychological condition of the character known as Swede who is the catalyst of chaos, nothing remains unambiguous. The simple fact is that it really is never going to be clear exactly what Swede’s deal is and so therefore to gain some sort of foothold on understanding, one must try to understand what is going on inside the minds of the other characters.
As inexplicable as figure out Swede may be, figuring out the motivations and psychological conditions of the other characters is ridiculously easy. The story concludes with that primal cry in fog of theory uttered by the Cowboy: "Well, I didn't do anythin', did I?"
It is the ironic coup de grace of a story constructed upon irony because the Cowboy still remains incapable even some after the events of understanding that what led to it all was not that nobody tried to do anything, but that they all succeeded in doing the same thing: putting their self interest above the good of the many.
