Carrie

A detailed Summary of Carrie

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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Approximate Word count = 1640
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Movies