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Part 2: Pages 196-215
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Carrie, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Puberty, Adolescence, and Coming of Age
Female Sexuality and Shame
Conformity vs. Ostracization
Cycles of Abuse
Sin vs. Atonement
Summary
Analysis
Earlier that night, the blood buckets fall. Carrie is doused in blood, and she telepathically feels Tommy’s pain as he’s struck. She closes her eyes, overwhelmed with mortification that she’s been tricked again. Someone begins to laugh, and she opens her eyes, looking in horror at the blood covering her and thinking back to the blood running down her thighs in the locker room. Everyone joins in on the laughter. At first Carrie is frozen, then, devastated, she staggers off the stage. Miss Desjardin runs towards her, offering help, but Carrie thinks she’s faking her compassion and flings her against the wall. She flees the school and crawls across the ground. Defeated, she prepares to go home—but then, she decides to take revenge. Resolving to ruin the night with the sprinklers, she goes back inside.
This section tells the same series of events as Norma’s prior testimony, but, crucially, does so from Carrie’s point of view. This provides insight into Carrie’s thought process after being assaulted by the pig’s blood. It is particularly traumatic to her due to being reminiscent of her menstruating in the locker room, one of the most traumatic instances of bullying she’s suffered and the impetus for all of this happening in the first place. It is also notable that, apparently, Carrie does not initially intend to kill anyone: her revenge is simply to soak everyone with sprinklers.
Themes
Carrie walks back into the lobby and slams the gymnasium doors shut, savoring how the students desperately push to get out. She looks through the window and sees the sprinkler pipes, then recalls the thick cables covering the stage. She turns on the sprinklers, then watches in surprise and delight as Josie is electrocuted onstage. Laughing, she takes control of all of the cords and circuit breakers. An electrical fire begins, and a student named Rhonda Simard burns alive. As the gym goes up in flames, Carrie begins to dissociate, her heart pounding wildly. She exits the building and walks towards downtown Chamberlain, giggling madly. She begins to open every fire hydrant she sees, then begins to walk to a nearby gas station—the first, but not last, she’ll pass during the night.
Although Carrie’s initial intentions are not homicidal, seeing her classmates again causes her to completely break psychologically. Disturbingly, she begins to play with the school’s electrical system like it’s a toy, a dark echo of her practicing her telekinetic abilities by lifting objects at home. When Rhonda burns alive and the gym goes up in flames, Carrie’s only reaction is to walk away giggling, showing how her previous propensity for kindness and her bonds with the other students has completely dissipated in the wake of her immense mental trauma.
Themes
In the future, the White Commission interrogates Sheriff Otis Doyle. He talks about receiving a radio transmission about Ewen’s fire from Officer Jacob Plessy; he never hears back, since Plessy was later killed. He receives more transmissions as the situation escalates, so he makes his way back to Chamberlain from a neighboring town. When he arrives, he’s stunned to find half the town engulfed in flames. He encounters a distraught Sue, who has just crashed her car after the school explosion. Sue insists that Carrie caused the disaster and that “they’ve hurt Carrie for the last time.” The Commission asks him if she said “we” instead of “they,” but Doyle can’t say for sure. Doyle talks to Sue about what happened, and she begs him to find Carrie. He then tells her to go home.
Sue’s insistence that Carrie caused the disaster despite having no hard evidence suggests that she, like Quillan, has been telepathically linked to Carrie—however, her case is even more notable, since Carrie is nowhere near her when Sue correctly makes this assumption. The Commission’s interrogation about Sue’s specific wording, in which they try to include her in the “they” who have hurt Carrie, also implies that they might be attempting to make a scapegoat of her by suggesting that she was the one who pushed Carrie over the edge.
Themes
After Doyle arrives in town, Vic Mooney approaches him, disheveled and grinning deliriously. He hysterically recounts how Carrie electrocuted the promgoers, although Doyle struggles to follow him. In the middle of their conversation, another gas station explodes. Tom Quillan runs out of the police station, much to Doyle’s relief, and tells Quillan that he’s been manning the police radio and telling surrounding towns to send help. He also tells Doyle that a hospital is being set up in the police station. Then, he warns Doyle to watch out for Carrie. When Doyle asks Quillan how he knows that it’s Carrie, Quillan blinks in confusion and says that it just came to him.
When Vic and Quillan approach Doyle, they both also understand on an almost intuitive level that Carrie is responsible for the disaster, further emphasizing how her psychological influence is spreading throughout Chamberlain along with the carnage she’s causing. Meanwhile, the destruction in Chamberlain continues unabated: while the first gas station exploded was a major event in the narrative, the second one is almost a background event.
Themes
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At 11:46 p.m., another AP ticker reports the major disaster that has spread from the school to the rest of Chamberlain, reporting at least 67 dead. This is the last ticker that the Chamberlain Clarion is able to release before it is blown up by an explosion on Summer Street. By midnight, phone lines are completely jammed. Residents wander helplessly into the streets. Carrie emerges from a church where she has been praying, although she has received no answer. She looks at the people and decides to make them her sacrifice by destroying nearby power transformers, littering the ground with live wires. After watching her victims get electrocuted and burned to death, she heads towards home.
The destruction of the Chamberlain Clarion serves as something of a breaking point in the narrative, with a major source of epistolary exposition being wiped from the page; in this way, Carrie’s destruction has almost broken past the novel’s fourth wall. The imagery in Chamberlain of jammed phone lines and helplessly wandering residents is almost apocalyptic, and Carrie’s decision to kill dozens of people on a whim shows that she has lost all sense of self besides her desire for revenge.
Themes
