The Blue Hotel

Pat Scully is the proprietor of the Palace Hotel, who lures arrivals at the Romper train station to stay at his hotel. He is aggressively solicitous, “so nimble and merry and kindly that each [guest] probably felt it would be the height of brutality to try to escape” (363-64). Scully is Irish, but his “foreignness” is less palpable than that of the Swede, as his speech reflects: “Scully’s speech was always a combination of Irish brogue and idiom, Western twang and idiom, and scraps of curiously formal diction taken from the story-books and newspapers” (375). He takes the work of hospitality seriously and is initially extremely subservient with the Swede. Ultimately, though, Scully’s patience has a limit, and after the Swede accuses Johnnie, Scully’s son, of cheating, Scully is eager to see the men fight. When Johnnie loses, Scully is eager to beat the Swede himself, but his sense of morality—that it would not be right to beat a man for winning fair and square—prevails. Scully is one of the five men that the Easterner claims is partially responsible for the Swede’s murder, due to his eagerness for the Swede’s fight with Johnnie.

Johnnie Scully has a hotter temper than that of his father, Pat, and is one of the more consistent characters in the story. He first appears while engaged in a fractious series of High-Five games with the old farmer, and throughout “The Blue Hotel,” he continues to play and quarrel with various opponents. Johnnie takes quick offense at the Swede’s conviction that men must have been murdered in the hotel. When Scully tries to placate the Swede, Johnnie becomes more and more disgusted with his father, and more and more obvious in his disgust. This disgust turns to anger after Scully allows the Swede to clap him too hard on a shoulder that bears an old injury: “Johnnie [addressed] his parent in an aside. ‘Why don’t you license somebody to kick you down the stairs?’” (376). When the Swede accuses Johnnie of cheating, Johnnie furiously defends his honor—even though it later emerges he was cheating, though the game was not being played for money. Pride is Johnnie’s downfall; when the Swede soundly beats him, his concern is not for his own injuries, but only over whether he managed to hurt the Swede in return. Despite this, he appears to have a good reputation in Fort Romper, as nobody in the saloon wishes to associate with the Swede once they learn it was Johnnie Scully with whom he was fighting.

Tall and tan, the cowboy is a character whose actions drive the plot primarily through instigation rather than reaction. He heightens the atmosphere of aggression during the card game by slamming his winning hands onto the table “with exceeding force” (366), though he seems ignorant of his role in increasing tension in the room. The cowboy is convinced of his viewpoints without real reason—he insists that the Swede is actually Dutch—and seems incapable of seeing things from anyone else’s perspective. When the Easterner points out that the Swede seems scared of the West, the cowboy cannot fathom someone whose unfamiliarity with the American West might allow them to view it as monolithic: “’But,’ the cowboy said, deeply scandalized, ‘this ain’t Wyoming, ner none of them places. This is Nebrasker’” (373). The cowboy makes a halfhearted attempt to stop the fight that breaks out between Johnnie and the Swede, but he quickly turns bloodthirsty and eggs it on. Despite this, when the Easterner puts forth his theory of Social Responsibility and Culpability, the cowboy cannot understand it, insisting that he did nothing wrong; not only does he miss the point of what the Easterner is saying, but he lashes out in anger when faced with his own ignorance.

The Easterner, “a silent little man from the East, who didn’t look it, and didn’t announce it” (363), is the quietest and evidently calmest of the men involved in gameplay at the Palace Hotel. When the Swede begins insisting that he will be killed, the Easterner responds only to a direct address, and then only after considering his words. The Easterner is the closest thing Crane offers to an impartial observer. Unlike the other characters, the Easterner attempts to see things from others’ points of view; it is he who proposes that the Swede is likely scared of the “Wild West,” though he himself recognizes that this place is largely mythological. He tries harder than the cowboy or Scully to dissuade the Swede and Johnnie from fighting. He lacks the bloodthirstiness of the other characters and does not seem to experience the same frustration with the Swede as do Scully, Johnnie, and the cowboy. It is in character, then, that the Easterner’s sin ultimately ends up being one of inaction: He knows that Johnnie is cheating but fails to say anything, something that causes him guilt after the man’s murder. The Easterner consequently proposes the idea of collective social responsibility and decries the unfairness of punishing only the gambler, although, perhaps typically, he does not seem to know what to do about it.