“Carrie” (post 1) by Stephen King (post 7): Multiple personality story in which telekinesis is evidently a power of protagonist’s protector personality

The most common reading of this novel is that Carrie, a graduating high school senior, “uses her newly discovered telekinetic powers to exact revenge on those who torment her” (1).

“Telekinesis is the ability to move objects or to cause changes in objects by force of the mind” (2, p. 50). It is a pseudoscientific idea (3).

But Carrie’s telekinetic powers are newly discovered only from the point of view of her regular, host personality, who had had a memory gap for the telekinetic powers, evidently powers of an alternate personality, present since early childhood:

“And now, seemingly unbidden—like the knowledge of menstruation—a score of memories had come, as if some mental dam had been knocked down so that strange waters could gush forth. They were cloudy, distorted little-girl memories, but very real for all that. Making the pictures dance on the walls; turning on the water faucets from across the room; Momma asking her (carrie shut the windows it’s going to rain) to do something and windows suddenly banging down all over the house; giving Miss Macaferty four flat tires all at once by unscrewing the valves in the tires of her Volkswagen…but now there was no denying the memory…and something flexed, not flex but FLEX, something huge and unformed and titanic, a wellspring of power that was not hers…Then she had fainted herself. And after that there were no more memories. Momma did not speak of it. The butcher knife was back in its drawer…” (2, pp. 108-110).

A memory gap is a cardinal symptom of multiple personality (search “memory gaps”). However, in the novel so far, it does not appear that the author intended the story to have anything to do with multiple personality, per se. So why is the memory gap included? It may be another example of gratuitous multiple personality, meaning that it is in the novel only as a reflection of the author’s own psychology.

1. Wikipedia. “Carrie (novel).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_(novel)

2. Stephen King. Carrie [1974]. New York, Anchor Books, 2011.

3. Wikipedia. “Psychokinesis.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychokinesis