The Blue Hotel.Stephen Crane
by Celia Rodriguez

     The metamorphics used in The Blue Hotel  reveals some interesting
facts about how the dramatic effect is created and how the actual telling
of the story is moored to Crane's philosophic and moral standpoint.
Religion is a dominating metamorphics he puts to work in the story.  He
also activates components speaking of violence and war throughout the
text.  A complete analysis that would do justice to these would require
far more than one page.  Having mentioned them, I will discuss two
equally important themes:  colors speak and color is a moral statement.
     Color and contrast are talked about in human speech metamorphics.
Bright colors represent speaking out or screaming while less vivid ones
represent hushing or perhaps whispering.  The beginning sentences put to
use the colors speak metaphor.  "The Palace Hotel... is a kind of heron,
causing the bird to declare  its position against any background"
(1593).   In this manner he describes the hotel as screaming  and howling.
Further, he writes that the Palace Hotel [because of its color] makes the
dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a gray swampish hush.
      The  color is a moral statement metaphor is also seen at the
beginning of the story where Crane equates color with moral value.
Bright colors like the blue of the hotel are daring, and darker colors
like brown-red and green are morally strict.  He uses color in this sense
to contrast the morality of the East and the West.  "With this [bright
blue] opulence and splendor, these creeds, classes, egotisms, that
streamed through Romper on the rails day after day, they had no color in
common (1593).  The idea of color being a moral statement is particularly
conventional among the pious where a color such as bright blue would be
considered a sign of vanity and therefore sinful.  Crane describes the
outrageous shade of blue and the expressions of shame and pity it
provokes among the passengers in the duller colors of the East.
Therefore, if color is moral,  then the blue color of the hotel is a sign
of a profane free spirit , of moral indifference, and Western
independence.  The color  of the hotel is shocking to passers-by from the
East, including the Swede, to whom the striking color is a sign of an
amoral and lawless society.
     Crane employed  color for both  aesthetic and moral ends. He created
an emotional atmosphere and expressed moral value.  He used blue to
remind his characters that they are alienated from, and  insignificant in
the universe.  Red is the color  of anger and passion.  It signals danger
and is dominant  inside the hotel.  Furthermore,  a red light burns
outside the saloon where the Swede is eventually killed.  The snowflakes
are "blood-color" as they pass the path of the lamp's shining ( 1612).
Also, the Swede has "two spots brightly crimson" on his "deathly  pale
cheeks" (1599) to forewarn us that  he doomed to
perish.