How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
[Hurstwood] began to see as one sees a city with a wall about it […] Those inside did not care to come out to see who you were. They were so merry inside there that all those outside were forgotten, and he was on the outside. (33.7)
Walls dividing a city? That's whack. By employing the metaphor of the wall—something impenetrable and divisive—this passage suggests the exact opposite of everything the city was ideally supposed to be in the Gilded Age: a place of abundant opportunity for all.
Quote #8
On the bill-boards, too, he saw a pretty poster, showing her as the Quaker Maid, demure and dainty. More than once he stopped and looked at these, gazing at the pretty face in a sullen sort of way. His clothes were shabby, and he presented a marked contrast to all that she now seemed to be. (45.1)
Poor Hurstwood: it's pretty hard to avoid your ex when she's on a billboard. In the end, Carrie rises in class and Hurstwood falls, as this passage so strikingly illustrates. What conclusions can we draw from this outcome?
Quote #9
A study of these men in broad light proved them to be nearly all of a type. They belonged to the class that sit on the park benches during the endurable days and sleep upon them during the summer nights […] Miserable food, ill-timed and greedily eaten, had played havoc with bone and muscle. They were all pale, flabby, sunken-eyed, hollow-chested, with eyes that glinted and shone and lips that were a sickly red by contrast… They were of the class which simply floats and drifts, every wave of people washing up one, as breakers do driftwood upon a stormy shore. (47.2)
Geez, narrator—could you make us any more depressed? Does the novel suggest that people in this class of extreme poverty have any chance of class mobility?