Carrie is not just a compelling exploration of the horrors that can result from unchecked bullying and religious fanaticism. It’s also a fascinating study of the epistolary form, nested perspectives, and the use of mixed media in storytelling.
What is Epistolary Fiction?
Epistolary narratives use documents like letters, diaries, and news clippings to drive their plots. It’s a framework that offers multiple perspectives, insights into unseen events, and adds a voyeuristic sort of realism to a story.
The primary benefit of using an epistolary structure is its ability to showcase and democratize disparate, subjective viewpoints. This narrative dispersion doesn’t just provide a deeper understanding of characters and their motivations,If and when those characters are reliable, of course. it removes the author’s voice from the narrative and allowsOr forces. readers to draw their own conclusions.
Epistolary fiction also enables authors to reveal information progressively, generating suspense and intrigue as readers piece together the story.While this benefit is most readily realized in mystery or thriller novels—where uncovering hidden information plays a central role in the plot—it’s an incomparable tool in the horror writer’s toolbox.
Stephen King’s Carrie is an Epistolary Novel
In the case of Carrie, the epistolary narrative style allows King bring the Black Prom into focus gradually, building suspense and tension as readers slowly learn what the rest of Carrie’s post-Black-Prom world understands tacitly.
Here’s how the novel begins:
News item from the Westover (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966:
RAIN OF STONES REPORTED
It was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th. The stones fell principally on the home of Mrs. Margaret White, damaging the roof extensively and ruining two gutters and a downspout valued at approximately $25. Mrs. White, a widow, lives with her three-year-old daughter, Carietta.
Mrs. White could not be reached for comment.
(King, p.3)
Ominous enough.
On the next page, we’re told that Carrie is a pariah, who also happens to be telekinetic:
Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow. On the surface, all the girls in the shower room were shocked, thrilled, ashamed, or simply glad that the White bitch had taken it in the mouth again. Some of them might also have claimed surprise, but of course their claim was untrue. Carrie had been going to school with some of them since the first grade, and this had been building since that time, building slowly and immutably, in accordance with all the laws that govern human nature, building with all the steadiness of a chain reaction approaching critical mass.
What none of them knew, of course, was that Carrie White was telekinetic.
(King, p.4)
Further down the same page, we see that she’s been bullied since grammar school:
Graffiti scratched on a desk of the Barker Street Grammar School in Chamberlain:
(King, p.4)
Carrie White eats shit.
And then at the very end of the next artifact we’re presented, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of the horror we’re wandering toward (underline mine):
From The Shadow Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific Conclusions Derived from the Case of Carietta White, by David R. Congress (Tulane University Press: 1981), p. 34:
It can hardly be disputed that failure to note specific instances of telekinesis during the White girl's earlier years must be attributed to the conclusion offered by White and Stearns in their paper Telekinesis: A Wild Talent Revisited—that the ability to move objects by effort of the will alone comes to the fore only in moments of extreme personal stress....
We have only skimpy hearsay evidence upon which to lay our foundation in this case, but even this is enough to indicate that a “TK” potential of immense magnitude existed within Carrie White. The great tragedy is that we are now all Monday-morning quarterbacks . . .
(King, pp.5-6)
So by this point, we’ve been shownWith no fewer than three distinct, referenced documents, mind you. that Carrie is a tormented, telekinetic outcast who’s responsible for something terrible enough to spawn new vernacular and drive an ongoing academic discourse.
But we have no idea what that terrible thing could be.
Because this is page six.Welcome to the fucking show, folks.
Why Stephen King Wrote Carrie as an Epistolary Novel
King employs a host of narrative frames—like newspaper articles, interviews, book excerpts, and reports—to narrate Carrie White’s telekinetic rampage.
This technique not only adds depth to the narrative but also encourages readers to actively engage with the text while assembling the story from the disparate documents.And, of course, the reader is also tasked with determining the reliability of each document. Because these ‘factual’ documents don’t always agree on the facts.
Moreover, integrating mixed media like newspaper clippings and reports imparts a sense of authenticity to the narrative. By presenting the story through seemingly “real” documents, King anchors the supernatural elements of the tale within a framework that feels more familiar and less fictive.
As an example, here are two witnesses trying to explain a preternatural knowledge of Carrie White, which her power imbued upon them as Chamberlain burned:
From the sworn testimony of Thomas K. Quillan, taken before The State Investigatory Board of Maine in connection with the events of May 27-28 in Chamberlain, Maine (abridged version which follows is from Black Prom: The White Commission Report, Signet Books: New York, 1980):
...Q. Could the school be seen from that window?
A. Sure. It's on the other side of the street, a block and a half down. People were running around and yelling. And that's when I saw Carrie White.
Q. Had you ever seen Carrie White before?
A. Nope.
Q. Then how did you know it was she?
A. That's hard to explain.
(King, pp.144-146)
And:
“From the sworn testimony of Mrs. Cora Simard, taken before The State Investigatory Board (from The White Commission Report), pp. 217-18:”
...Q. Did you know the person who came out of the church?
A. Yes. It was Carrie White.
Q. Had you ever seen Carrie White before?
A. No. She was not one of my daughter's friends.
Q. Had you ever seen a picture of Carrie White?
A. No.
Q. And in any case, it was dark and you were a block and a half from the church.
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Mrs. Simard, how did you know it was Carrie White?
A. I just knew.
Q. This knowing, Mrs. Simard: was it like a light going on in your head?
A. No, sir.
Q. What was it like?
A. I can't tell you. It faded away the way a dream does. An hour after you get up you can only remember you had a dream. But I knew.
Q. Was there an emotional feeling that went with this knowledge?
A. Yes. Horror.
(King, pp.163-166)
This sort of world-building affords us with a sense of the story’s in-universe aftermath and zeitgeist that would be impossible to achieve with a traditional narrative.The first thing every creative writing student learns is ‘show, don’t tell.’ What’s so cool, here, is that King is showing by telling.
Nested Perspectives in Carrie
King’s use of nested epistolary is another technique that adds depth to the narrative and heightens the suspense and horror elements of the story.
Basically, these are instances where a document is in conversation with another document—like a newspaper article that references a book, or a book that references a newspaper article.
These nested perspectives are a handy way for King to manufacture verisimilitude, sure; pitting one document against another is a great way to make a story feel more real.
But it’s important to remember that this sense of realness is rooted in tension and conflict. When two documents disagree, the reader is forced to choose which one to believe.
These can be broken down into four main categories:
- Later Reflections
- Academic Dialogue
- Carrie’s Internal Monologue
- Carrie’s Subjection of Sue
Later Reflections
A defining characteristic of the documents that comprise Carrie is that they’re all written well after the Black Prom.
This means that they’re all written with the benefit of hindsight and being mellowed (or hardened) by time.
From My Name Is Susan Snell (p. 45).
You know, I'm not as sorry about all of it as people seem to think I should be. Not that they say it right out; they're the ones who always say how dreadfully sorry they are. That's usually just before they ask for my autograph. But they expect you to be sorry. They expect you to get weepy, to wear a lot of black, to drink a little too much or take drugs. They say things like: “Oh, it's such a shame. But you know what happened to her—” and blah, blah, blah.
But sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutterball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love. I'm not sorry that Tommy is dead any more. He seems too much like a daydream I once had. You probably think that's cruel, but there's been a lot of water under the bridge since Prom Night.
(King, pp.50-52)
This is a layer of abstraction that we can’t afford to ignore when we’re thinking about Carrie’s story.
Because it creates distance from whatever objective truths might’ve been present in the moment.
And that distance (and it’s attendant subjectivity and obfuscation) distances us from our understanding of Carrie herself. Whoever she might’ve been.
Which is exactly her tragedy.
Academic Dialogue
This is one of my favorite passages from the entire novel, and it’s one that doesn’t really get talked about much. It’s additional color to contextualize for us the nature of the ongoing discourse surrounding the Black Prom.
From “Telekinesis: Analysis and Aftermath” (Science Yearbook 1981), by Dean D. L. McGuffin:
There are, of course, still these scientists today—regretfully, the Duke University people are in their forefront—who reject the terrific underlying implications of the Carrie White affair. Like the Flatlands Society, the Rosicrucians, or the Corlies of Arizona, who are positive that the atomic bomb does not work, these unfortunates are flying in the face of logic with their heads in the sand—and beg your pardon for the mixed metaphor.
(King, pp.50-52)
Also: Academic sniping is one of my spirit animals, and this is a fine example of it.
And hey: let’s not pretend for even a second that King didn’t name this guy McGuffinMacGuffin [muh-guhf-in] n. a plot device in a work of fiction, often a physical object, that drives the plot forward without factoring into the story’s resolution. on purpose. But Carrie’s self-referentiality and meta-cuteness is whole ‘nother article.
Carrie’s Internal Monologue
King has a typographic tool that he’s been using since… well, since Carrie, which was the first novel he ever published.
He interjects under-punctuated, usually-lowercased, primal-feeling phrases wrapped in parens to show us what a character is actually thinking, however briefly, and irrespective of whatever our surface-level narration is saying.
It’s a snapshot of raw, unrefined id at its most impulsive.
It looks like this:
Tommy had called earlier with her corsage, and now she was pinning it to the shoulder of her gown herself. There was no momma, of course, to do it for her and make sure it was in the right place. Momma had locked herself in the chapel and had been in there for the last two hours, praying hysterically. Her voice rose and fell in frightening, incoherent cycles.
(i'm sorry momma but I can't be sorry)
When she had it fixed to her satisfaction, she dropped her hands and stood quietly for a moment with her eyes closed. There was no full-length mirror in the house,
(vanity vanity all is vanity) but she thought she was all right.
(King, p.100)
Characters in King’s novels aren’t always aware of these thoughts—at least in a sapient sense—but they’re always true.
And that’s what’s so important about these.
Because their intrinsic veracity makes them a primal sort of document, wholly sovereign, and uncontestable.
And so we’re afforded a vantage point that’s both intimate and objective, and allows us to see tension, conflict, and truth in a way that the story’s charactersAnd the narrator, too. The form that these interstitials take places them outside the purview of whoever’s telling us the story. cannot.
Carrie’s Subjection of Sue
During their final interaction, Sue invites Carrie to look into her mind to see that she’s telling the truth—that she never hated Carrie.
Instantly, Carrie structures Sue’s consciousness into the form an enormous library, with all of her thoughts and feelings and knowledge—realized and unrealized—ordered and catalogued on the shelves.
And then Carrie blitzes through.
(look carrie look inside me)
And Carrie looked.
The sensation was terrifying. Her mind and nervous system had become a library. Someone in desperate need ran through her, fingers trailing lightly over shelves of books, lifting some out, scanning them, putting them back, letting some fall, leaving the pages to flutter wildly
(glimpses that's me as a kid hate him daddy o mommy wide lips o teeth bobby pushed me o my knee car want to ride in the car we're going to see aunt cecily mommy come quick i made pee)
in the wind of memory; and still on and on, finally reaching a shelf marked TOMMY, subheaded PROM. Books thrown open, flashes of experience, marginal notations in all the hieroglyphs of emotion, more complex than the Rosetta Stone.
Looking. Finding more than Sue herself had suspected—love for Tommy, jealousy, selfishness, a need to subjugate him to her will on the matter of taking Carrie, disgust for Carrie herself,
(she could take better care of herself she does look just like a GODDAM TOAD) hate for Miss Desjardin, hate for herself.
But no ill will for Carrie personally, no plan to get her in front of everyone and undo her.
The feverish feeling of being raped in her most secret corridors began to fade. She felt Carrie pulling back, weak and exhausted.
(why didn't you just leave me alone)
(carrie i)
(King, pp.245-246)
So here we’ve got Sue’s consciousness made into a grand repository that Carrie can subjugate for her purpose.
And Carrie finds what she sought: Sue’s truth.
But more than that, Sue bore witness to an objectified version of herself that she’d never seen before.
And she didn’t entirely like what she saw.
The Final Word on Carrie
Stephen King’s Carrie stands as a testament to the power of innovative storytelling techniques.
By employing the epistolary form and incorporating various forms of media, such as newspaper articles, letters, and excerpts from fictional books, King creates a rich and immersive narrative that draws readers into the world that Carrie White left in her wake.
This approach not only adds depth to the story but also serves to heighten the suspense and horror elements, making for a truly unforgettable reading experience.
