Macbeth hath murdered sleep and Carrie hath murdered time

“Macbeth hath murdered sleep and Carrie hath murdered time” is Sue Snell’s bitterly ingenious phrase for a catastrophe that has made ordinary time—and any future beyond it—seem irrelevant. Spoken inwardly as she sits amid the burning aftermath in Chamberlain, it joins the scale of Carrie White’s destruction to Sue’s personal knowledge of loss: Tommy Ross is dead, and Sue believes Carrie is responsible.

Form and Meaning

The expression is built as a parallel: Macbeth is associated with the murder of sleep, while Carrie is said to have murdered time. Its altered second half makes a familiar-sounding tragic formula newly specific to Sue’s circumstances. Time has passed, but, as Sue recognizes, it no longer seems to matter. The phrase gives that numbness a compact, memorable shape without relieving it; Sue herself calls it a bon mot and smiles dolefully at the bleakness of the thought.

The Moment of Its Formation

The phrase occurs after Otis Doyle has left Sue. She sits on the steps of the Chamberlain U-Wash-It, staring at the burning sky without really seeing it. She accepts Tommy’s death with a dreadful ease and holds, without knowing how she knows, the conviction that Carrie has done it. The expression grows directly out of this collision between private bereavement and public catastrophe: someone runs past, babbling that Carlin Street is on fire, while Sue’s attention returns to Tommy being gone.

Foreshadowing and Contrast

Sue’s thought moves from the formula about murdered time to the immediate prospect of another death: she believes Carrie has gone home to murder her mother. This is Sue’s conviction and anticipation in the moment, not a confirmation contained in the expression itself. The phrase therefore stands between what Sue already knows—the loss of Tommy and the destruction around her—and what she expects next. Its bleak wit briefly gives order to events that have overwhelmed her, even as its parallel structure links the catastrophe’s public devastation with the deaths and losses Sue can name.