For Friday: King, Carrie, pp.1-75



Group “C” should answer TWO of the following:

Q1: What stories in our previous book seem to have most inspired King to write Carrie? Where do we see the most specific echoes of characters, themes, or imagery from one or more of the stories to this novel? And yes, you can assume King knew all of them—he’s one of the biggest readers of any published writer!

Q2: One of the most innovative aspects of the novel is how King tells it: interspersing different characters’ perspectives with ‘non-fiction’ reports that record the aftermath of the book’s events. How does reading excerpts from Ogilvie’s Dictionary of Psychic Phenomena and Carrie: The Black Dawn of T.K. add to (or alter) the narrative?

Q3: In Estelle Horan’s interview with Jack Gaver, she says, “Nobody wants to believe it, nor even now. You and all the people who’ll read what you write will wish they could laugh it off and call me just another nut who’s been out in the sun too long. But it happened” (42). Related to Jackon’s story, “The Lottery,” why are the events of the past so easy to forget even when people make a conscious effort to remember them? Why are sometimes, eyewitnesses and records still not enough to make history live on?

Q4: When the girls assault Carrie in the locker room, the narrator suggests that “Suddenly all this and the critical mass was reached. The ultimate shit-on, gross-out, put-down, long searched for, was found. Fission” (10). What did this moment represent to the girls—and to the community? What does Carrie represent to them as well?

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