Susan Snell

Susan Snell is both an agent of Carrie White’s exclusion and the character who most clearly undergoes a crisis of responsibility because of it. She begins as one of the girls who joins the shower-room humiliation, laughing and throwing sanitary products, but later refuses the comfort of treating the cruelty as harmless fun. Her attempt to repair what she helped damage leads to Tommy Ross inviting Carrie to the Spring Ball; after the massacre, Susan survives as a traumatized witness who must face Tommy’s death, Carrie’s dying presence, and the persistent question of what it means to belong to a crowd that has harmed another person.

Identity and Introduction

Susan first appears within the communal world that surrounds Carrie at Ewen High School. In the shower room, she is not simply a detached observer. When Carrie stands confused beneath the water, the other girls laugh at her, and Susan reacts with a mixture of laughter, disgust, exasperation, and pity. The scene establishes Susan’s divided perception: she can recognize that Carrie looks helpless and does not understand what is happening, yet that recognition does not prevent her from participating in the group’s treatment of Carrie as an object of ridicule. Susan’s social position is also connected to the ordinary rituals of adolescent femininity that Carrie cannot comfortably inhabit. After the girls’ commotion, Susan quickly removes a towel from her hair and begins combing it, an action that belongs to the shared performance of grooming, confidence, and normality. Carrie, by contrast, is exposed as someone who does not know the rules of the scene. Susan’s ease within that environment does not make her innocent; it shows how belonging can function as a pressure to perform cruelty in order to preserve one’s place among others.

Participation in the Shower-Room Hazing

The shower-room incident is the decisive moral fact in Susan’s early characterization. When Carrie’s menstruation becomes visible, the girls’ laughter turns into a coordinated attack. They bombard her with tampons and sanitary napkins and chant “Plug it up, plug it up, plug it up, plug it-” Susan throws the same objects and chants with them. Her participation is especially revealing because the narration shows her trying to reassure herself that the act is harmless. The thought that there was “no harm in it really” operates as a private excuse while her conduct is visibly contributing to Carrie’s panic. The group’s violence is not presented as the isolated act of Chris Hargensen. Chris begins the catcall, but the cruelty expands through imitation, laughter, objects taken from purses and a broken dispenser, and the chorus of the crowd. Susan’s behavior exemplifies that diffusion of responsibility: she has the ability to stop, comfort, or summon help, yet the collective atmosphere makes participation feel easier than resistance. The girls’ long history of pranks against Carrie—hiding her underwear, circulating a fabricated love letter, tripping her, and humiliating her at camp—shows that the shower-room attack is the culmination of a social pattern rather than a spontaneous joke. Rita Desjardin’s later condemnation makes the ethical structure of the scene explicit. The teacher tells the girls that they did “a shitty thing on Friday,” rejecting the idea that the participants can shelter behind school custom, adolescent humor, or the claim that no single girl intended the full result. Susan therefore carries a specific form of guilt: she did not invent the entire culture of abuse, but she helped make its most immediate eruption possible.

Recognition and Atonement

Susan’s relationship to Carrie changes after she begins to understand the distance between fitting into the group and acting rightly toward an individual. Carrie had tried to erase the “red-plague circle” drawn around her from the moment she left the White family home on Carlin Street and entered school life. Susan’s later response matters because it recognizes that Carrie’s isolation was not an intrinsic defect but a stigma repeatedly produced by classmates, religious judgment, and social ridicule. Susan’s attempt at atonement is not expressed as a vague feeling alone. She decides that Tommy Ross should take Carrie to the Spring Ball, and she openly acknowledges that she owes Carrie something. She explains that the invitation might bring Carrie out of herself and knock down some of the barriers around her. The plan contains both generosity and limitation: Susan cannot undo the shower-room scene, and she initially imagines social inclusion as a possible remedy for years of exclusion. Nevertheless, the decision marks a real break with her earlier conduct because she acts against the group’s established role for Carrie rather than reinforcing it. The arrangement also develops Susan’s relationship with Tommy. After making love with him, she finds her thoughts returning to Carrie, indicating that the atonement plan has entered her private life rather than remaining a school-based gesture. Her attention is divided between ordinary heterosexual intimacy and the unresolved moral presence of the girl she helped humiliate. That juxtaposition gives Susan’s remorse a concrete setting: responsibility intrudes upon the apparent normality of romance, music, clothes, and preparation for the dance.

Witness, Testimony, and Loss

Susan’s later importance comes from her position as a survivor who must narrate what she saw without being able to make the disaster coherent. In the aftermath, she is questioned about what happened and answers that Carrie repeated what she had already said, though in a calmer manner. The formulation emphasizes the bureaucratic attempt to turn catastrophe into testimony while also preserving the instability of traumatic recollection: Susan can report Carrie’s words, but reporting does not restore the world that existed before the Spring Ball. Her grief becomes unmistakable when Sheriff Doyle leaves her and she sits on the steps of the Chamberlain U-Wash-It, staring at the burning sky without seeing it. Tommy is dead, and she accepts this with an ease she experiences as dreadful. The ordinary laundromat setting contrasts with the burning sky and the scale of the catastrophe. Susan’s shock is not theatrical; it appears as a numb recognition that the person who had agreed to accompany Carrie has been killed, and that her own plan for repair has ended in an event she could neither predict nor prevent. Susan later approaches the place where Carrie has fallen after the disaster. At first she thinks Carrie is dead, seeing her crumpled figure across the parking lot and comparing it to animals crushed by vehicles. The scene forces Susan to confront Carrie not as the school’s comic target but as a wounded, nearly extinguished person. When Susan’s awareness reaches Carrie’s dying consciousness, the encounter becomes the final movement of their relationship: a psychic contact that bypasses the social crowd and confronts the individual face the crowd had refused to see. Susan is also asked to identify Carrie White. The question, “Mrs. Simard, how did you know it was Carrie White?” belongs to the investigative structure surrounding the disaster, where eyewitnesses and officials seek a definite chain of recognition and responsibility. Susan’s testimony cannot reduce the event to a simple story of one guilty person. Her own presence in the account preserves the uncomfortable fact that Carrie’s destruction emerged from accumulated social violence, institutional failure, and the retaliatory power unleashed at the Spring Ball.

Narrative Role and Significance

Susan functions as the novel’s most sustained figure of compromised conscience. Unlike the classmates who can describe the evening as a spectacle or claim that everyone was merely caught up in something special, she is pushed toward an acknowledgment that shared laughter does not erase individual responsibility. Her early participation and later remorse remain in tension; the narrative does not make her innocent by giving her an atonement plan, nor does it make her morally identical to the most deliberate perpetrators. Her perspective also exposes the difference between social acceptance and ethical recognition. At the Spring Ball, Carrie appears to the crowd in the clothing and ceremonial setting associated with acceptance, yet the group’s laughter and exclusion continue beneath the surface. Susan’s attempt to bring Carrie into that world cannot control how others will treat her there. The promise of rejoining the human race is thus revealed as conditional and fragile, dependent on the same crowd whose earlier conduct created Carrie’s isolation. Susan’s final significance lies in the fact that she remains after the spectacle has ended. She loses Tommy, confronts Carrie’s dying presence, gives evidence, and carries the memory of having joined the chant. Through her, the novel refuses to make the disaster solely a supernatural revenge narrative. The catastrophe is also a record of how ordinary people participate in cruelty, how institutions respond after the fact, and how remorse can become a form of witness even when it cannot restore the dead.