Carrie Part 1, Section 1 Summary & Analysis

Summary: Part 1, Section 1

“News item from the Westover (Me.) Weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966:”

A brief news item from 1966 reports a rain of stones falling on the widow Margaret White and her three-year-old daughter, Carrietta. Mrs. White, who lives on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain, Maine, does not provide a comment for the article.

The novel moves forward to 1979, when none of the students at Ewen High School know that Carrie White has telekinesis, or TK, which is the power to move objects by force of will. She is a pale, chunky girl with acne, and her peers have tormented her since grade school. On Friday morning after gym, the girls are in the locker room and have already begun to dry off and change while Carrie remains in the shower. The gym teacher, Miss Desjardin, snaps Carrie out of her stupor with a clap and tells her to hurry. The girls giggle, and when Carrie responds with a froglike sound, they giggle again. Miss Desjardin leaves, and as Carrie steps out of the shower, the girls see blood running down her leg. Chris Hargensen shouts “Per-iod!” and the other girls join in the chant. Sue Snell feels a mix of pity and hatred for Carrie, and yells at her to clean herself up. Ruth Gogan yells that Carrie thinks tampons are for lipstick, and Helen Shyres pretends to throw up. Sue calls Carrie a “big dumb pudding” and tells her that she is bleeding. Carrie looks down and shrieks. Someone throws a tampon at Carrie, and the others begin to pelt her with tampons and sanitary napkins while they shout at her to “plug it up.” Carrie backs away, howling and grunting. The girls stop and are silent, watching her. Sue says aloud what she has been wondering to herself, that this must be Carrie’s first period. Carrie is sixteen years old.

An excerpt from a 1981 scholarly article entitled The Shadow Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific Conclusions Derived from the Case of Carrietta White notes that TK becomes evident only in moments of extreme personal stress. A separate excerpt notes that the exceptionally late onset of and traumatic events surrounding Carrie’s menstrual cycle must have triggered her TK. It also notes how remarkable it is that Carrie had no knowledge of the concept of menstruation, and quotes Ruth Gogan who saw Carrie using a tampon to blot her lipstick the year before the locker-room incident. When Ruth asked Carrie what she was doing, Carrie inquired if that was not the proper usage of a tampon and Ruth, who later characterized the incident as “kinda cute,” confirmed that it was. From that day forward, Carrie thought that anyone giving her the correct information about tampons was trying to tease her.

Analysis: Part 1, Section 1

From the beginning, King establishes Carrie as a person apart from her peers, looked down upon because she is different. The beautiful girls in the Ewen High School locker room base their opinions about Carrie solely upon what they see. Because Carrie’s outer appearance is not palatable to them, the girls have never bothered to get to know her during the many years they’ve gone to school together, and because of this, they don’t consider her feelings. Not only do Carrie’s peers fail to empathize with her but they also scarcely see her as human. This detachment allows them to see a person shriek in terror but still escalate their torment of her. Sue Snell feels pity for Carrie but not so strongly that she attempts to thwart her peers’ efforts to bombard and taunt her. The angry mob of teenaged girls moves as one, and when Carrie’s howling causes them to stop, they stand in silence together.

The fact that Carrie, who is presumably the same age as her peers, has never menstruated is so unusual that the others don’t even contemplate it. When Sue connects the dots, it highlights her ability to think for herself and then share her conclusions with her peers. The excerpt from The Shadow Exploded further highlights how truly exceptional it is for a girl Carrie’s age to menstruate for the first time and uses the anecdote that Ruth shares as proof of Carrie’s lack of knowledge about menstruation. The exceptional circumstances surrounding Carrie’s first period are not, however, the key takeaways from the excerpt. The article refers to Ruth as one of Carrie’s “surviving” classmates, the first indication that mayhem will ensue. King reveals this fact as casually as he introduced the notion of a rain of stones at the beginning of the section and juxtaposes it with the rain of tampons at the section’s end.

The tampon anecdote also establishes a pattern of Carrie being teased by her peers and being regarded as separate from them. The fact that Carrie uses lipstick suggests that she is aware of the importance of a woman’s physical appearance, but blotting it with a tampon highlights how little she knows about what happens biologically. In this regard, she is similar to her own peers, who focus on the surface. While they lack the empathy to look beyond Carrie’s surface, Carrie lacks the knowledge to truly understand herself.

Next section Part 1, Section 2