Finding Blame and Responsibility in Stephen Kings Carrie
From the opening salvo of Youre bleeding, you big dumb pudding, (King 6) to the end the Congregational Church on Carlin Street is gone, swept away by fire (178), Carrie is a novel about blame and responsibility and the dangers of too much of one, and too little of the other. Carrie, without a doubt, was a special girl. While her talents happened to be of the telekinetic sort, they were talents nonetheless. An outcast from her social circles, the child of a single, quite insane, religiously zealous mother, Carrie had very little in the way of tools needed to deal with the kind of horrors that would be inflicted upon her by the girls and boys of her school. Some might say that she was a target, that she brought the storm of teasing and torture on herself by sheer power of her weirdness. But, it might be more accurate to say that the destruction of the school, the death of all those children and adults, and the near destruction of the town came about because no-one took responsibility for their own actions, and everyone pointed their finger of blame to someone else.
