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"The Blue Hotel" and "The Open Boat"

all" (407). The men are all amused by the idea that he has mistaken their civilized town for such a place and Scully tries to calm him by taking him off for a quiet drink and showing him pictures of his wife and his dead daughter in order to assure him of the normalcy of life in the town.

But Scully's efforts do not mean that the Swede gives up his wild ideas. He calms down, but his delusion is "not relinquished, merely mastered" (Weiss 161). When he claims Johnnie is cheating at their card game a fight ensues, the Swede wins and goes off to the tavern where he aggressively provokes the town's gambler who stabs him in a struggle. In the coda to the story the Easterner meets the Cowboy much later and reveals that the court has gone easy on the gambler and given him only three years for killing the Swede. But he also reveals that he too had seen Johnnie's pointless cheating and he claims that by refusing to back up the Swede he shares in the guilt for the Swede's death. As the Easterner says, however, "We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede" (431).

Weiss, who concentrates on the question of the desire of the Swede, "psychotic to begin with," for the kind of punishment he fears so greatly, ignores the importance of the context of the Swede's delusion about the town. Weiss says that this "framework" is "trivial, perhaps a weakness" in the story (158). He identifies the weakness as Crane's use of the "widespread, half-comic assumption on the part of Easterners and Europeans in the nineties that the western United States were inhabited solely by cowpokes, Indians and bandits" as the basis of the Swede's delusions (1

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"The Blue Hotel" and "The Open Boat". (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 20:50, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1709055.html