Caroline “Carrie” Meeber is often selfish and unimpressed with her lack of education. Certain that money will bring her contentment and happiness, she is easily distracted by the trappings of wealth. Carrie is better able to express emotions as a character on stage than in her actual relationships, and she is willing to use men in her efforts to secure materialistic comforts, indifferent to the catastrophic emotional damage she causes. Ultimately, she closes the novel alone and trying to understand why all her success never brought her happiness. Carrie’s obsession with fashion, hairstyles, restaurants, houses, and furnishings has brought her only awareness—except that her experience teaches her little. In the end, the narrator—and by extension the reader—learns the moral insight, not Carrie.

Carrie represents a type, a “fair example of the middle American class” (4). She is not presented as a character with a complex psychology whose motivations are layered and subtle. To the author, she is a test case and a study in cultural sociology, demonstrating a premise foregone before Carrie steps on the train to Chicago. The narrator says as much early on:

When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things.