Carrie White–Susan Snell relationship

The relationship between Carrie White and Susan Snell moves from remorse at a distance to a final, involuntary intimacy: on the night of the disaster, Susan finds the wounded Carrie and becomes mentally joined to her as she dies. Susan’s earlier effort to make amends is neither simple selflessness nor a completed reconciliation. The closing encounter gives Carrie a chance to voice her sense of betrayal, while Susan is forced to witness the pain behind it with a closeness that ordinary speech could not have achieved.

The Atonement and Its Unsettled Motives

Susan’s connection to Carrie is shaped by the attempt to repair harm. After deciding to act, Susan sits alone at home, hemming a dress and listening to a scratched Jefferson Airplane album. Her parents are out for the evening; she is relieved that they have not stayed to offer praise or announce that she is growing up. Instead, she is left with the discomfort of examining why she acted. She fears that looking too closely might reveal selfishness beneath her remorse, yet concludes that she has done what she set out to do and that this is enough.

That private uncertainty matters. Susan does not present her intervention as proof of moral purity, and the narration does not settle the question for her. Her wish to make amends coexists with self-suspicion: she can value what she has done while remaining unsure what it says about her. The relationship therefore begins not with easy sympathy between the girls, but with Susan’s effort to take responsibility without being certain that her motives are entirely generous.

Susan imagines a possible fairy-tale ending in which Tommy Ross kisses a sleeping Carrie. The fantasy briefly makes her act seem capable of giving Carrie happiness through a conventional romance. It is only an imagined possibility, not an outcome Susan can guarantee, and it places Carrie’s future in a storybook frame that the disaster will brutally overturn. The gap between that hopeful image and the later scene of Carrie dying gives Susan’s act of atonement an unresolved quality: she has tried to change what happens to Carrie, but cannot control the larger chain of events.

The Search During the Disaster

The connection becomes urgent after the catastrophe at Ewen High School. In testimony about the night, Susan asks—indeed begs—Sheriff Doyle to find Carrie. The appeal makes Carrie’s whereabouts a personal concern amid a crisis being reported and handled as a public emergency. The first radio notice of trouble at the school reached the sheriff at 10:21, while the town’s systems were failing: the area hydrants had been vandalized, and every telephone line still operating was jammed shortly after midnight. Susan’s request to locate Carrie unfolds against that broader breakdown of communication and rescue.

When Sheriff Doyle leaves, Susan sits on the steps of the Chamberlain U-Wash-It and stares at the burning sky. She has accepted that Tommy is dead, and she is certain that Carrie caused the destruction, though she cannot explain how she knows. Her conviction is presented as immediate and instinctive rather than as the result of evidence she has assembled. The certainty does not erase her concern for Carrie. Susan continues toward her, carrying grief for Tommy and knowledge of Carrie’s role in the disaster at the same time.

At The Cavalier, Susan sees a burning wooden building and the charred remains of a car near the back door. She understands that Carrie has caused the fire, but does not investigate whether anyone was in the car. Her attention has narrowed to the curled figure on the ground. Carrie has a knife hilt protruding from her shoulder and lies in a small pool of blood, unable to turn herself over. The contrast between the force Carrie has exercised during the disaster and her helplessness in this moment changes the immediate meaning of Susan’s earlier atonement: she is no longer acting to arrange a better future for Carrie, but responding to a person who is gravely wounded and alone.

The Final Psychic Encounter

Susan kneels and gently turns Carrie onto her back, supporting her by one arm and her uninjured shoulder. When Carrie’s eyes flutter, Susan experiences her perception of Carrie sharpening into a mental presence. Carrie asks who is there; Susan answers in the same wordless mental fashion, identifying herself. The exchange establishes a direct psychic connection at the moment when ordinary conversation is no longer adequate to the scene.

Carrie’s first response is reproach: she feels that Susan and the others tricked her. Susan does not claim to understand what has happened; her thought reaches toward the immediate questions of Carrie’s condition and Tommy. What passes between them is not a calm reconciliation. Images, emotions, blood, sadness, fear, and the memory of repeated tricks arrive together, overwhelming Susan’s ability to separate one feeling or event from another. The passage presents their contact as an exposure to Carrie’s accumulated experience, not as a debate in which Susan can explain herself or undo the past.

The psychic intimacy also refuses a simple division between guilty and innocent. Susan has acted in an effort to make amends, but Carrie’s accusation remains part of their last exchange; Susan’s good intention cannot prevent Carrie from experiencing the events as another betrayal. At the same time, Susan’s compassion breaks through the numbness of shock. She tries to withdraw and let Carrie have privacy in dying, but cannot disengage from the connection. Carrie’s final mental scream fades, and Susan feels the moment when the light of her consciousness goes out. The contact makes Susan not merely a witness to Carrie’s death, but a witness who experiences it from within.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

The relationship ends without a conventional reconciliation or a future in which either girl can answer the other. Susan’s physical care—turning Carrie onto her back—offers a small, concrete counterpoint to the violence surrounding them, but it does not settle Carrie’s accusation or transform the disaster into forgiveness. Their final closeness is real precisely because it does not erase the injury between them.

The larger aftermath gives that private encounter a public frame. Reports describe a devastated Chamberlain, Maine, where 440 people are known dead and eighteen remain unaccounted for; sixty-seven of the dead were Ewen High School seniors. Mass burial ceremonies and a memorial service follow, but the town’s grief persists in funerals, damaged institutions, and a sense of hopelessness. Susan’s experience belongs to that collective loss, yet remains distinctive: she is the person who both seeks Carrie and receives Carrie’s dying thoughts.

Susan’s later account, My Name Is Susan Snell, closes with her thinking about the time remaining before her own light is carried into darkness. The image recalls the dying consciousness she has just experienced and shows that the encounter does not end for her when Carrie dies. The relationship’s final significance lies in that lasting burden of knowledge: Susan’s effort to make amends brings her near Carrie, but only at the end does she encounter the full force of Carrie’s hurt, in a connection that grants understanding without offering repair.