Sister Carrie

The next morning he looked over the papers and waded through a long list of advertisements, making a few notes. Then he turned to the male-help-wanted column, but with disagreeable feelings. The day was before him—a long day in which to discover something—and this was how he must begin to discover.

Ascent-and-descent architecture—Carrie's Chicago arrival, Hurstwood's theft and flight, New York stage success parallel to Hurstwood's skid into starvation—runs two trajectories on the same urban ladder, neither moralized, so plot scores 89.

Mrs. Hurstwood was the type of woman who has ever endeavoured to shine and has been more or less chagrined at the evidences of superior capability in this direction elsewhere. Her knowledge of life extended to that little conventional round of society of which she was not—but longed to be—a member.

Carrie the passive force of desire, Hurstwood the manager who trades security for passion, Drouet the cheerful enabler, and Minnie and Hanson the wage-earning floor each exert distinct pressure on Carrie's rise; Hurstwood alone sustains the second half, so cast scores 90.

When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility.

Forty-seven chapter titles slow the middle with department-store and boarding-house detail; the New York acceleration and Hurstwood's compressed decline restore momentum at naturalist tempo, so pace scores 82.

In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.

Dreiser's thick, repetitive, documentary sentences trade lyricism for cumulative force; the rocking-chair cadence at the close is among the coldest endings in American fiction, so prose scores 88.

The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye.

Chicago and New York as consumption machines—the flat on North Clark Street, the Broadway theatre district, the Fifteenth Street mission line—carry economic weight in every streetcar and shop window, so world scores 90.

She looked at the little slip bearing her sister's address and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape, now passing in swift review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be. When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things.

Ch.I—the train to Chicago, the four dollars, the "cosmopolitan standard of virtue"—immediately establishes the naturalist wager: city as moral laboratory, beauty as capital, so hook scores 88.

It seemed as if he thought a while, for now he arose and turned the gas out, standing calmly in the blackness, hidden from view. After a few moments, in which he reviewed nothing, but merely hesitated, he turned the gas on again, but applied no match. Even then he stood there, hidden wholly in that kindness which is night, while the uprising fumes filled the room.

Foundational American naturalism—desire without punishment or reward, sympathy without sentiment, the first major novel to treat a "fallen" heroine without converting her; the ending refuses both uplift and tragedy, so innov scores 92.

In her rocking-chair she sat, when not otherwise engaged—singing and dreaming. Thus in life there is ever the intellectual and the emotional nature—the mind that reasons, and the mind that feels. Of one come the men of action—generals and statesmen; of the other, the poets and dreamers—artists all.

Carrie rocking by the window dreaming happiness she will never feel while Hurstwood turns on the gas unnoticed—the split-screen close is devastating because neither character knows the other's fate, so ending scores 93.