Sister Carrie: Chapter 45 Summary & Analysis

Hurstwood’s life is deteriorating. He moves from cheap rooms to even cheaper rooms, living on the seventy dollars he got from selling furniture. He reads about Carrie in the papers and feels that in his shabbiness, “he [presents] a marked contrast to all that she now [seems] to be.” Soon, Hurstwood has only twenty dollars and moves to a “fifteen-cent lodging-house.” He spends his days daydreaming about life back in Chicago.

One day, Hurstwood sees in the papers that there is a new play at the Casino and that “Carrie had gone!” He feels nervous, checks his money, and counts “but ten dollars in all.” Hurstwood knows that many of his fellow lodgers beg but is horrified at the idea. Coming to his last fifty cents, Hurstwood goes out to look for work. He tries to get a position at a hotel and is given “scrub work” to do. However, his constitution is poor. One day, Hurstwood finds that he cannot lift the culinary boxes. The hotel physician discovers that Hurstwood is sick with pneumonia and sends him to Bellevue.

After being discharged in May, Hurstwood weighs “but one hundred and thirty-five pounds” and is told “to apply to the charities.” Hurstwood goes back to the fifteen-cent lodging house and resorts to begging. One day, Hurstwood sees an announcement regarding Carrie’s return to New York with the Casino Company. On a “severe run of ill-luck,” he resolves to ask Carrie for “a few dollars.” Hurstwood visits the Casino in hopes of meeting Carrie. However, he misses her in the merry theater-going crowd, especially as when Carrie arrives, she seems “so elegant and far away.”

At this time, “an ex-soldier turned religionist” takes to the streets, lining up homeless men and asking the wealthier pedestrians to give money for lodging. A weary Hurstwood joins this line, as “it was a simple way out of one difficulty.” Hurstwood gets a place in a lodging house and exclaims to himself, “I’ve got to eat, or I’ll die.”