Theodore Dreiser in the novel, Sister Carrie, presents a moving pageant of one of the most stirring epochs of American history: the transformation of American society from a slumbering countryside into the most dynamic industrial civilization that man has produced on the Earth. True realism alone can cope with and give expression to such epochs. Realism, in this sense, involves the creation of prototypal characters in prototypal situations.Sister Carrie, one of the most controversial novels of its time, offers a vast panoramic view of America and its expanding industrial civilization at the turn of the century. The novel concerns itself with a close study of the individual. It takes several protagonists from varied economic strata of American life and shows how they are harmed and corrupted by the fraudulent claims of a spurious American dream. The remarkably realistic characters and contentious situations created by Theodore Dreiser illustrate the double standards within the growing American society at the turn of the 20^th century. David W Noble (1965) has analyzedSister Carrie on the social level as a study of individuals "caught up, in a society that had lost its capacity to believe in the values that give it order and continuity."

Dreiser is the pioneer of realist novel in America. This realism was the cause of the truthfulness which startled and antagonized the critics. The literary critic of New York Sunday News (1955) expressed the general realism when he said about Sister Carrie: "Told with an unsparing realism and detail it has all the interest of fact…the possibility of it all is horrible: an opposing arrangement of human society…. The impression is simply one of truth, and therein lies at once the strength and the horror of it."

Sister Carrie describes the American values which Dreiser found to be materialistic to the core. The money ideal is exposed as the great motivating purpose of life in America. The basic story is uncomplicated. Three human lives are caught in the winds of chance and circumstance: one tossed upward toward (but never reaching) fulfillment, another dragged downward to ruin, a third swept along briskly but at a dead level. Like Thoreau, but with immeasurably less premeditation, Dreiser had driven life into a corner and confronted its essential facts, both of meanness and sublimity. Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, the untutored man is but a wisp in the wind.

The principal supporting characters include a young small town girl, Carrie Meeber, drawn by undefined dreams to the great city, and the men she meets during her search for fulfillment. Carrie, unencumbered by moral values but full of the illusions of ignorance and youth, boards the Chicago train. What happens to a young girl of this type under these circumstances in the Dreiserian world is that she falls under the sway of the forces wholly superhuman that govern life. Gerber (1964) describes, "Life had much to do with chemisms and magnetisms; it was dominated by invincible material forces; and of these, the drives for power, money and sex were primary." Even before an hour had passed aboard the train, Carrie was reacting to these dark mysterious forces. On the train taking her to Chicago, a flashy traveling salesman, or drummer, Drouet attracts her. Impressed by his purse choked with greenbucks, his new suit and shiny tan shoes, and his general sheen of sophistication, Carrie is soon speaking with Drouet as confidentially as if he were an old family friend. Drouet is a rake, but like Carrie he has a charming innocence. "In his good clothes and fine health he was a merry, unthinking moth of the lamp" (Sister Carrie, p. 63).

American Literature Journal, Literary Critic, Modern Metropolis, Potential Depth, Materialistic Considerations, Fictional Work, Classical Myth, Industrial Civilization, Panoramic View, Invincible Material Forces, Material Advancement, Surface Manifestation.