In the prime of life, she rocks poignantly like an old grandmother on a Maine porch, her memories mostly ashes. Spoken in the voice of a biblical prophet, Dreiser’s final words clang shut the gates that bar her entry into the “vale of soul-making” (to use Keats’s beautiful phrase) that she desires: “In your rocking chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.”

Dreiser’s portrait of Hurstwood, by contrast, is haunting and harrowing. The slow disintegration—or decomposition—of his personality is a triumph of the novelist’s art. As his business prospects in New York turn sour—he lacks the effrontery and drive to get ahead in its highly competitive atmosphere—Hurstwood begins to flounder. He fitfully seeks employment, timidly reenacting Carrie’s discouraged moods when she searched for work in Chicago: hesitant, fearing rejection, inventing pretexts to stay home. One by one, the gregarious, confident layers of his self peel off, and he surrenders to longer and longer bouts of inaction and brooding. Like Carrie, he sits in a rocking chair, absorbed in the flow of random thoughts and jumbled feelings. Each stage of his decline is marked by some physical gesture: his shabby clothes, stubbly beard, and haggard face; his insatiable scanning of newspapers; his long hours lounging in hotel chairs in order to keep warm and pass the long afternoons; his demented counting of his money as it dwindles, especially after his desperate attempt to recoup at the poker table fails; and his scrimping on food to save pennies. As Hurstwood turns into a debased version of his former self—uncouth, surly, pathetic, repulsive—Carrie feels increasingly alienated from, then ashamed of, him. Their relationship unravels with neither protest nor self-justification from him. At the nadir of his degradation, he decides to ask her for money, but gazing at her lionized image in front of the theater, he knows that they now inhabit separate spheres, that her orbit is remote from his, and he slinks away. “What’s the use?” he mutters (p. 443), the same words he utters before taking his own life.

Hurstwood rallies once when he trudges to Brooklyn to sign up as a scab during the trolley strike (it is the most vivid scene in Sister Carrie). With stoic mien, he endures the taunts and violence directed at him by the hostile, frustrated workers; but his threadbare clothes cannot protect him from the cold. That demoralizing episode is Hurstwood’s last glum hurrah before he annihilates himself. He is corrosively lonely, like a Christ in a Pietà without a merciful mother to grieve for or console him. The ultimate indignity is that he is buried in a potter’s field grave. In death, he has become, literally, a nobody, a cruel symbol of the peculiarly American theme Emily Dickinson posed with mocking humor: “I’m nobody. Who are you?” For Dreiser, obscurity in America is a mortifying fate; distinction is the summum bonum, the Holy Grail. How it is to be attained is the process that Dreiser dissects with the analytical skills of a forensic anthropologist.

In Sister Carrie, there is no iron law or invisible hand that determines character, no single implacable force that governs human relations. To be sure, although no disciple of Karl Marx, Dreiser graphically depicts the grim conditions that limit and burden the lives of the proletariat (the word had little currency in America, except in socialist circles). If, like Hurstwood, he sided more with the workers than with the capitalists, he did not underestimate the will of the latter to crush the laborers. Some of the novel’s most memorable scenes visit the lower depths—Dreiser is kin to the Ashcan School of painters—where the desperate, broken ranks of the defeated loiter: the homeless lining up for a loaf of bread or shivering in frigid weather while a maverick social worker flits in from the shadows and solicits coins from affluent passersby to house the men in a Bowery flophouse for the night. Dreiser does not flinch from exposing the raw, suppurating wound of the body politic, though he pushes no reform agenda. There are no settlement houses in Sister Carrie to succor the despised, the losers, the pariahs. Faith also plays no role, since religion is virtually absent from the lives of his characters (the rich do not flock to fashionable churches on Sunday, nor is God blamed or appealed to for help; the God most worshiped is Mammon).

The closest Dreiser comes in Sister Carrie to a philosophical absolute or a social theory is his statement that mankind is stranded in evolutionary limbo: too far removed from natural instinct to behave according to its dictates, and too inchoate to govern the self according to the dictates of reason. This belief is played out and tested in the pivotal chapter in which Hurstwood debates whether or not to steal money from the safe at Fitzgerald and Moy’s. Dreiser builds the scene shrewdly. Although secure in his position as manager, which affords him a comfortable income and a small cachet, Hurstwood has grown estranged from his wife and children. Mrs. Hurstwood, “a pythoness in humor,” is content so long as her social-climbing ambitions for herself and her daughter Julia are indulged with a season ticket at the racetrack, chic clothes, or a holiday at a fancy Wisconsin resort, where she can maneuver, like Mrs.