Carrie

The final section of the novel contains little plot, giving the sense of lingering in shock on what has come before. This mimics the suspension of trauma—the inability to move forward in a future wholly alien to the past. While the collected documents give an impression of an official understanding, the final section lacks closure in its depictions of a listless town “waiting to die” (300), its teachers and administrators left ineffectual and doubting their abilities, and an entire generation of graduates wiped from the face of the Earth. The weight of Carrie’s destruction oppresses the survivors, and the genetic nature of her ability only promises that the cycle will begin again; the devastation will continue, another “world-beeter” will arise, so long as lessons from the past are unlearned. The people moving from town rather than staying to rebuild it become a symbol of this attempt to live without confronting the past.

Consisting entirely of documents, the final section underscores the question of how to make sense of events that defy rational explanation. The evidence seems paltry compared to the intimacy of the dramatic narrative, which provides access to the thoughts and private actions of the protagonists. The documents are subject to the prejudices of investigators, the obscurity of time, and the unwillingness of observers to recognize the truth of events or admit their culpability. They present an outsider’s history of what happened, but their lack of answers suggests a fundamental distrust of institutional knowledge and procedure. Contrasted with Sue and Carrie’s final interaction, the dryness of the documents implies that what is lacking in official understanding of such calamities is humane understanding and compassion.

Carrie’s death report lists Sue Snell as the person who identifies Carrie’s body. In a symbolic sense, there is no other person who can fulfill this role. With Carrie’s mother dead, there is no one who knows Carrie better than Sue. They share this final intimacy and are forever tied together on the hospital document, the White Commission, and finally through Sue’s retelling of Carrie’s story in her autobiography. In each of these instances, Sue’s ambivalence toward her experiences and toward Carrie demonstrates the enduring existence of trauma. In an earlier excerpt from her autobiography, Sue, reflecting on the time that has passed, states that she is “not sorry that Tommy is dead any more” (165), nor is she upset about her appearance before the White Commission, in which she denied any special connection to Carrie. However, she is still sorry about Carrie—in particular, that her humanity has been forgotten in light of the monster she has been made out to be. In the final excerpt from her autobiography, Sue still has not come to terms with what she has encountered, needing time “to think things over” and haunted by the vision of brain death she witnessed in Carrie’s final moments (303). Further complicating this is her reaction in the moment, when she views Carrie as “a bleeding freak […] meaningless and awful in its pain and dying” (289). Sue ultimately stands in for the reader confronted with both the documentary evidence and the dramatic narrative, who must answer the complex question: How can we have sympathy for one who has wrought such destruction? Though it brings little comfort, Sue’s answer remains: compassion.