Stephen King's novel "Carrie" tells about a telekinetic girl who has been bullied by everyone all her life and finally gets her revenge.
At the beginning of the story, the main character Carrie White is seventeen years old. The reader gets to know that she has grown up in a very special environment: Her fanatically religious mother Margaret White has kept her pretty isolated in a world of sinlessnes and punishment. Carrie has telekinetic power which she once made stones fall like rain with when she was four years old. We later get to know this was a consequence of Margaret trying to kill her daughter.
As Carrie is at the age of seventeen, she gets her first menstruational period after a gym lesson while showering with the other girls in her class, not knowing why she is bleeding at all. She i very frightened and thinks she has to die. That is why the girls in her class laugh at her and throw sanitary towels and tampons. The girls are punished by their teacher, and most of them accept that. One girl, Susan, thinks she ows Carrie even more and asks her boyfriend Tommy to take Carrie to the prom ball to help her into society. He agrees, and Carrie decides to accept his offer, acting against her mother's will for the first time in her life.
Carrie is really happy at the prom ball, even more as she and Tommy are voted queen and king of the ball. As they stand on the stage ready for the crowning, buckets with pig blood are dropped on them, organized by a girl from the class as revenge for the punishment.Tommy is killed by one of the buckets, while Carrie escapes and tries to get home. On the way, she changes her mind and uses her telekinetic forces which she has learned to use during the last weeks to punish her enemies. She first lets it rain in the gym hall, then causes fire and finally loses control and makes the whole town explode and burn.
In the end, Carrie returns home, kills her mother who hits her with a knife, leaves the house again and dies getting to know that she has killed a lot of innocent people.
Stephen King tells the main story from Carries point of view. He describes her feelings in a third person limited voice and makes the reader feel with her. There are also many interruptions in the text. These are excerpts from different other books and newspapers, both about Carrie herself, her town's destruction and telekinesis in general. All of the books Stephen King quotes are probably non-existant, some of them even published after his own novel. While Stephen King publishes his novel in 1974, he tells a story happening in 1979 and pretends to quote books written even later.
The interruptions allow the reader a certain distance from Carrie's person. They show different points of view, give explanations for events and behaviours. There is also the possibility given to look into Carrie's past, which gives us a chance to analyse Carrie's character.
In this way, we get to know Carrie pretty well, also as other people see her. The girl's feelings, first of all her fears, cause all important events in the story. Carrie herself is influenced by her childhood, her mother's religious affliction and her own telekinetic power.
The reader is told that Carrie has always been an unwanted child. Margaret White wanted to live sinless, even as she was married. Anyway, she became pregnant twice, and after one abortion, the second child, Carrie, survived. Margaret sees her daughter as a punishment and hates her for it. She tries to kill Carrie several times, but never succeeds. Once she scares the girl that much that she unconsciously makes big stones fall on the Whites' property by her telekinetic power. As Margaret can't get rid of her daughter, she forces her into her own fanatic religious way of life. She makes her pray many times a day, isolates her from the bad and godless influence of other children and locks her into a closet whenever she has sinned. All those experiences make Carrie a strongly religious girl who is afraid of sin, God and her mother, representing higher instances for her.
Actually Carrie doesn't just have to atone for her own sins. She is punished all her life, just for existing, which is, if sin at all, her mother's fault, not her own. Margaret forces Carrie to stay in her closet over long periods for things she can't do anything about. The girl has to pray because a neighbour girl sunbathing in a bikini talked to her. She is punished for being aked to the prom ball with a boy, and her mother interprets even getting her period as a sin. Margaret white tries to save her daughter from the original sin of her own pregnancy. She doesn't realize that she herself is sinning all the time, especially when she tries to kill her own daughter.
Of course, Carrie doesn't live sinlessly either, but this wouldn't normally be a reason to treat her like Margaret does. By trying to heal her daughter from sin, she makes herself an even worse sinner. Carrie gets into the same position as Jesus, atoning for all the world's sin, but she can't take it and destroys her own town as revenge for it.
Sin and atonement play a very important role in the novel. While everybody sins all the time, Carrie is the only one to atone, being locked into her closet without knowing when she may come out again. Carrie is, in her mother's opinion, a product of sin, which makes her a victim of Margarets fanatic thoughts. She is born and dies as a consequence of sin, and her own life can be seen as punishment of that.
Although Carrie in the beginning shares her mother's belief in God, she finally loses her faith in him, which is the point when the story turns. First when Carrie realizes that Jesus can't or won't help her, she also turns away from her mother and everything she has ever been taught. The end of her religious thoughts, in some way means at the same time the end of many people's lives.
As a consequence of her religious education, Carrie will always be an outsider in society, just as her parents were, too. Already on her first day at school, everybody laughs at her when she gets down on her knees to pray before having lunch. As well, she has always been taught that people will come to hell as they sin and do not atone. But when she tells that at school, everybody makes even more fun of her.
Naturally, the outsider-position hurts Carrie's feelings. Being bullied by everybody all the time, she can't build up any self-confidence. She isolates herself and gets more and more dependent on her mother. As the girl has no friends, she is in a vicious circle, being tied to her mother stronger all the time and, influenced by her, withdrawing from society further and further. So to say, Margaret White is in spite of her hate for Carrie the only real clout on her.
There is also a lack of knowledge that makes Carrie stand outside society. Seventeen years old, she has never been told about menstruation. She thinks people telling her what tampons are really for as she uses them to take off her lipstick with are just making fun of her, as usually. When she finally gets her first period, she is really scared and thinks she has to die. Of course, the girls in her class like her even less after that. Nobody would blame them for thinking somebody not knowing about menstruation is stupid.
Although Carrie doesn't really look awful, people think she is. The girl doesn't ever make anything out of herself, uses little make up and just lets her hair hang down. The girls in Carrie's class feel digusted when they see her. The scene in th shower room, where she gets her period, makes this feeling even worse. Some girls really start to hate Carrie when they are punished for throwing napkins at her.
Carrie's late period possibly makes her telekinetic forces stronger, too. After the rain of stones when she is four, there are no more signs of telekinesis showing around Carrie until she gets her first very strong period at the age of seventeen. After this, she develops her power in a very short time. First she uses it subconsciously, turns the lights off in the shower room, makes the principal's ashtray fall and throws a boy off his bike. Later on, she learns to use her forces by will, and they grow strong enough to make petrol stations explode and stop the mother's heartbeat in the end.
Carrie's power helps her to fight against her childhood, her education and, particularly, Margaret. As the girl knows she would be able to win against her mother in any way, that she could even repeat the rain of stones, which she now knows she herself caused, she makes up her mind and stands up for her own life. She refuses to pray for forgiveness and finally leaves all her former life behind.
When Carrie dies she is told that the buckets with pig blood were not a conspiracy, but the deed of one girl and some friends of hers. She regrets what she has done to the town's inhabitants and forgives especially Sue what has been done to her all her life.
All those happenings and facts in Carrie's background make her the person she is: a frightened isolated girl, an outsider, who turns into a fear factor for the whole town as she is endowed with special power. She dies as quite a famous person who has played an important role in American history.
Stephen King's novel about Carrie's life and death might seem rather confusing to the reader. It takes some time to get used to the style with all the interruptions, many of them written in a very difficult scientific language. Not everybody will like the author taking away parts of the excitement by showing what will happen, sometimes even directly telling it.
Because of all the interruptions, one needs to go into the story rather deeply. Working with a log and writing down the important passages is very useful, but it's not easy in the beginning, when one doesn't know what might be important for the further story. i think, we ourselves managed quite well to go through the novel together, having the log and being able to talk about it.
Forside
