1、,Sister Carrie,By Theodore Dreiser,This novel has been called the “greatest of all American urban novels“,CONTEXT01 About the author 02 Summary of the novel 03 Character Analysis 04 Comment,01 About the author,Theodore Dreiser,Theodore DreiserAn American novelist and journalist. Naturalist school kn
2、own for portraying characters literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency,Sister Carrie (1900),An American Tragedy (1925),Jennie Gerhardt（1911）,02 Summary of the novel,Generally, it is a story about how Sister Carrie from a shoe worker to a mistre
3、ss of two men, and finally become a famous actress, driven by desire.,Caroline (Carrie) Meeber, a country girl from Columbia City, travels to Chicago to stay with her sister and her brother-in-low. She is a beautiful girl with kind mind, smart brain, sensitive sense, gifted acting skill. At the same
4、 time, she likes to go in for material comforts very much. On her train to Chicago, she meets Charlie Drouet, a charming, flashy salesman with a strong appetite for romance.,She is attracted by the prosperous and beautiful Chicago and dreams to live a wealthy life. But life is rough. She works in a
5、shoe factory with a low-paid wage and hard boring work. After a sickness, she loses her job. So she becomes the mistress of Charlie and lives a good life with him.,Then she finds her tired of pleasing Carlie and attracted by Charlies friend, George Hurstwood, a member of the upper middle class. Geor
6、ge is the manager of a famous bar in Chicago. She wants to marry George but George is married and she doesnt know. So after she knowing his marriage, she refuses to be and elope with him. At the same time, Georges wife finds him unfaithful so she decides to take Georges fortune which is under her na
7、me and get a divorce.,One drunken night, George steals the money from the bar and cheats Carrie. He tells Carrie that Charlie gets injured in a car accident and takes her to Detroit, then to New York. At first, Carrie is angry and asks him to take her back, later, she finds theres no choice. A few d
8、ays later, compunctious as he is, he send $20,000 back to the bar owner and keeps $10,000. So he cooperates with a man to run a bar. Although a little uptight in finance, he makes a comfortable life for Carrie.,But about 3 years later, the bar closes because someone buys the land. George loses his j
9、ob and money, becoming numb to life with age increasing. He hangs out in the streets and reading newspapers all day. So forced by life, Carrie begins to seek jobs herself. With gorgeous face and talented acting skill, she gradually becomes an actress and leaves George. George then lives a life on th
10、e streets with starvation and sickness. At last, he gives himself a suicide. Under the influence of Mr. Ames, a New Yorker and a scholar of sorts, Carrie finally lives a life she wants but she feels empty about the life she has.,03 Character Analysis,The last paragraph is a good summary to Carries l
11、ife.,The last paragraph is a good summary to Carries life.,Carrie is always dreaming and chasing the life she wants. She even sacrifices her morality. The first time Charlie gives her money, she refuses although with strong will to accept it. But she cannot keep the desire out. She loves beauty, bea
12、utiful clothes, shoes, and beautiful life. She is smart and sensitive.,So she knows the dissatisfaction from her sister and the brother-in-low, she knows what kind of women Charlie likes and imitates them to please him. These help her to be a great and attractive actress even when she acts as a supp
13、orting role without lines. But she is not a bad person. We can see her kindness. Especially after she meets Mr. Ames, her kindness deep in her heart is dug out.,As a comparison with Carrie, his experience shows that his way down is as the same as Carries way up; it is driven by desire. The turn of h
14、is life is his stealing. It pushes him down and down gradually until the living hell. Disappointed to the life in New York, he loses the ambition to stage a comeback. It may be connected to his age. From his life without Carrie, its easy to get to the old saying, money is not everything, but without
15、 money, everything is nothing. But what ruins him is also the desire for money and Carrie. His life is a good negative example for us,04 Comment,Dreiser started to lay out for the readers a dimensional panorama of American ripening capitalism. He evaded the current “genteel tradition” in literature
16、to record the cruel reality based on large quantities of material and detailed descriptions of peoples clothes, speech and the physical environment.,Uniquely, Dreiser struck the American myth that success and fame were not to be achieved by work and virtue, and he dramatized chance as a means of com
17、pelling characters to pay or gain for actions not their own. He presented Carrie, a new woman figure, drifts with the tide without judgement of her own. She followed whatever came along. She had not control, no freedom of will. But Dreiser neither condemned her nor praised her. This was the way she
18、had to be.,He said, a man is even as a wisp in the wind, moved by every breath of passion, acting now by his will and now by his instincts, erring with one, only to retrieve by the other, falling by one, only to rise by the othera creature of incalculable variability. Hes always serious, never satir
19、ical or comic.,Dreiser sometimes stood out as an omniscient God teaching that “the world is full of desirable situations, but, unfortunately, we can occupy but one at a time. It doesnt do us any good to wring our hands over the far-off things.” A vague, uncritical pursuit always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger.,
