Summary: Part 2, Section 9

“For Tommy Ross, age eighteen, the end came swiftly and mercifully and without pain.”

At 11 p.m., Sue takes her mother’s car and makes it to the bottom of the hill before the school explodes. Her head hits the wheel when she slams on the brakes, but she makes it out of the car before falling down from the blow. Unbeknownst to Sue, Tommy Ross is already dead by this point.

In an excerpt from his sworn testimony, Thomas Quillan, the town drunk, describes his view from a detention cell at the police station. At 10:40 p.m. on May 27, he sees Carrie at the fire hydrant before it explodes and watches Carrie as she walks downtown “grinning like a death’s head.” He cannot explain how but claims he knew she was thinking about making the town pay. He then looks over and sees the pumps at the gas station off their hooks, just before a man walks by and tosses a lit cigarette.

The narrator flashes back to Carrie’s point of view when the buckets fall. Carrie senses Tommy’s pain before she registers what has happened and thinks that Margaret was right after all. Carrie tries to scream as she realizes everyone is laughing at her, and she sees the “lying compassion” in Miss Desjardin’s face as she runs past her. Outside, Carrie calms down and considers going home, but then a rage rises in her and she decides to teach them all a lesson. When she shuts the lobby doors with her mind, the sound of the students’ screams is music to her ears. She thinks how funny Josie looks as he is being electrocuted, and when Rhonda Simard’s green skirt bursts into flames, Carrie heads into town to take care of the hydrants so no one can put out her fire.

In an excerpt from his sworn testimony, Sheriff Otis Doyle notes that less than forty minutes elapsed between the first reports of trouble at the school and the explosion there. At 11:12 p.m., Sue Snell flags him on his way into town. She asks Sheriff Doyle if Tommy is dead and if they caught Carrie yet. At 11:15 p.m., Vic Mooney, bruised and bleeding, lurches toward Sheriff Doyle and tells him that Carrie pulled all the plugs after they dumped blood on her and Tommy. At 12:10 a.m., every phone line in town is jammed. Carrie is inside a church on Carlin Street, groaning and swaying as she prays at the altar and sends the contents of the church flying. Receiving no answer to her prayers, she decides to go home to find her mother. She pauses on the church stairs to let loose the power wires among the townspeople who have begun to wander the streets.

In an excerpt from her sworn testimony, Cora Simard, Rhonda’s mother, describes seeing Carrie come out of the church. Cora and Helen’s mother, Georgette, are on their way to the school to find their daughters. She tells the court she knows Carrie is responsible but cannot explain how. The women walk carefully to avoid the fallen wires but Georgette takes a misstep, and Cora describes the smell of Georgette’s burning flesh as sweet and pork-like.

At home, Margaret sits in the dark with her butcher knife. The cuckoo clock falls from the wall and the mechanical bird squawks. Carrie walks in, covered in blood and grease. Margaret begins to talk about Ralph, and says she should have killed herself after the first time they had intercourse, before they were married. He promised not to do it again, and when she had the miscarriage, she felt that the blood washed away that sin. After weeks of celibacy, Margaret sent Ralph out of the house after he tried to touch her, but he later returned home drunk and took her by force.

Carrie begs her mother to stop but Margaret continues, yelling profanities about how much pleasure the act gave her and that she almost killed herself afterward. She points out that she also planned to kill Carrie as soon as she was born with the knife she now holds. Carrie says it is not right that she came home to kill her mother only to find her mother waiting to kill her. When her mother asks her to pray, Carrie screams for Margaret to help her and falls forward on her knees. Margaret plunges the knife deep into Carrie’s shoulder and falls back. Carrie stares at her mother and tells her that she is picturing her heart going slower and slower. Margaret whispers a prayer as her heart slows until it stops and she dies. At 1:15 a.m., Carrie staggers out into the backyard and down the street, the knife still in her shoulder.

Analysis: Part 2, Section 9

Carrie is a late bloomer, and she does not blossom completely until after the first man to acknowledge her beauty is dead. After the events of the prom, Carrie’s powers bloom as she transforms into someone who finds pleasure in deploying her pent-up rage. Tommy’s death is not the impetus for her rage, but it is important to note that because he was instantly knocked unconscious, he was not there to witness her shame or to see her transform into a grinning “death’s head” like the image that Thomas Quillan describes. It is the sight of everyone laughing at her that causes Carrie’s initial transformation from beauty into beast, and once she does, she sublimates her rage into a power that makes her drunk with laughter. Unlike the girls who did not pause to think about how Carrie felt as they pelted her with tampons, or three-year-old Carrie who could not grasp the implications of pelting her house with stones, this Carrie knows exactly how much she is making people suffer and revels in their pain.

When Cora Simard observes Georgette Shyres being electrocuted, she has no way of knowing that Carrie also observed Rhonda’s fiery death, which is the spark that ignites Carrie’s desire to fan the flames of her own immense power. When Carrie unleashes her power in the form of power cords on the unwitting residents who wander the streets, the gesture seems almost like an afterthought. Her main motive at this point is to get home to her mother, and pausing to inflict pain on her nameless, faceless neighbors is as unnecessary an act as Billy’s killing of the second sow.

When Carrie finally makes it home, her mother picks up the thread of the same story of blood and original sin, but this time she spells out her own role in this morality tale. In her previous warning about the dangers of blood and boys and cars and whiskey, she left out the pleasure that this sequence of events can sometimes culminate in. Margaret is quick to point out that Ralph took her by force, and though she was not a willing participant in the sexual act itself, she was driven to thoughts of suicide by the lust it stirred in her. Margaret’s verbal tirade is as disturbing to Carrie as any physical abuse she has endured at her mother’s hands, and when she uses those hands to plunge the knife into Carrie, it is at the same moment that Carrie has needed and wanted her mother’s help the most. In a final act of “tenderness,” Carrie ends her mother’s life in a much less violent way: by stopping the flow of blood in her heart.