Carrie

These first sections establish the dual narratives. The initial, epistolary narrative situates the timeframe in the future year of 1988, almost a decade after the events that destroy Chamberlain. The reports and articles contextualize the linear events of 1979, but they serve a subtler narrative function as well: Their objectivity counterbalances the paranormal aspects of the linear narrative, lending validity to otherwise unbelievable events. The differing voices and perspectives evoke public reactions to real-world traumatic events, as different individuals place their experiences in the wider context of the calamity and its causes. This raises questions about the nature of truth, the subjectivity of human experience, and the inability to understand traumatic events like Carrie’s mass murder. It is through the linear narrative of 1979 that King attempts to answer these questions.

One of the major ways the linear narrative—more properly called the dramatic narrative—does this is through its use of a third person omniscient narrator who has access to characters’ thoughts, represented in parenthetical asides. Carrie’s thoughts grow increasingly violent as she walks home until she invokes the idealized figure of “(savior jesus meek and mild)” (27). Carrie’s rage builds and her thoughts combine two biblical verses—Revelation 8:11 and 9:5—depicting retribution. Her thoughts center around Christian theology, as Carrie’s mind is saturated with her mother’s fundamentalism, but they waver between Christlike forgiveness and the apocalyptic moralism of Revelation. As these parenthetical interludes continue through the text with the thoughts of Chris Hargensen, Billy Nolan, Tommy Ross, Margaret White, and in particular Sue Snell, they suggest that no single perspective encompasses the “truth” of what happens after Carrie learns to weaponize her telekinesis.

While walking home, Carrie’s thoughts reveal the depth of her rage. Carrie is initially depicted as mute—almost numb to the world around her. However, once she is alone, Carrie envisions “Chris Hargensen all bloody and screaming for mercy” and imagines crushing her head with a rock (27). She then moves directly into imagery from the Book of Revelation. She takes solace that “Momma [said] there would be a Day of Judgement […] and an angel with a sword” and then longs to be “His sword and His arm” (27). This foreshadows the final identity Carrie takes on after her slaughter of the school and the town: She will become the avenging angel of Revelation. In this scene, the biblical imagery immediately precedes Carrie’s weaponization of her telekinesis to knock a small boy off his bike and attempt to shatter the window of an annoying neighbor.

The second section refines the work’s focus on the body as the site of shame. Margaret White’s reaction to the exposed body of her neighbor characterizes her coupling of violence and shame with the sexualization of the female body. Margaret, “screaming things about sluts and strumpets” (38), claws at her own body before dragging Carrie into their home. The theme continues in the dramatic narrative, as Carrie enters her home and beholds her own body: both the vessel of her telekinesis and the object she has been taught to shame. She undresses, examining her body, at times imagining beauty, but as she touches her breasts a deep sense of shame takes over. Carrie then views her body in light of her mother’s opinions, seeing it as dirty, lustful, and filled with “Something” placed there by the Devil.

The scene with Sue and Tommy inverts this sense of the body as the site of shame. Only after Sue confesses her part in the locker-room attack and her subsequent feelings of guilt do she and Tommy gain a deeper intimacy and, following this, have a much more fulfilling sexual interaction. A moral undercurrent runs through the text in which bodies are rewarded and punished based on their ethical choices. This scene also initiates one of the most prominent character arcs in the novel: the moral rehabilitation of Sue Snell.

The distinction between Carrie’s and Sue’s paths is the leading dichotomy in the novel. Sue is a total insider, accepted and liked among her peers and set upon a normative future that she visualizes in the car with Tommy. As she dwells upon her guilt, however, Sue bristles at this vision, which she sees as conforming to the expectations of those around her. What’s more, her actions in the locker room have altered her conception of what it means to conform; she essentially became a willing participant in a mob, acting under the influence of a “charm” that assured her, “There is no harm in it really no harm in it really no harm” (10).

Carrie stands opposite to Sue in that she is the total outsider. In depicting Carrie as rejected and taunted by those around her, the text demonstrates the denial of her basic humanity. The narrative constantly compares her to an animal and at first does not allow her human speech: Her attempt at speaking resembles “a strangely froggy sound, grotesquely apt” (6), and she afterward becomes a “a patient ox” who stares “bovinely” at the other girls (8). Miss Desjardin later thinks Carrie “look[s] like an ape” (14). This dehumanization of Carrie isolates her and allows others to normalize their bullying. Carrie’s path, like Sue’s, is forever altered by what occurs in the locker room, and the rest of the narrative primarily concerns the actions each takes after the assault.