Book review of sister carrie嘉莉妹妹读后感

Our Life Goal

---Book Review of Sister Carrie

“Sitting in the rocking chair, Carrie dreams her future”---this is the deep impression the novel Sister Carrie gives me, sending me into a mournful and thoughtful state.

Though Carrie, the heroine, was born in a working family of a flour mill, she yearns for the luxurious life in a big city. Ambitious as a girl like her, she goes to Chicago with a surge of being rich. Having difficulty in making a living and a strong desire to be wealthy, she, selling her virginity, cohabitates with salesman Drouet and later, to be richer, with hotel manager Hurstwood. Becoming a star on Broadway and living a so-called upper-class life, however, at the end, in the loneliness and desolation, she feels that life is empty and cannot find the true meaning of life.

Carrie is the embodiment of the typical Americans who are morally adrift in the brutal, unprincipled and materialistic world. Losing themselves in the world of benefit-first, market-directed economy, most Americans at that period run after fortune and fame all their lives, considering little about their moral ones. The current situation in China is the same. Students study for the sake of plump wallets, doctors work for the purpose of “red envelope”given by the helpless patients, and more similar to Carrie, young ladies, in order to live a sumptuous life, dream of marrying handsome and rich men or even become the other women of wealthy men.

Such a phenomenon reflects the prevalence of mammonism in our material society. Do their pursuits of fortune make sense? I don’t think so. Like Carrie, when these worldly people get what they want at last, most of them come to realize that their lives are empty. As far as I am concerned, what the author manages to tell us is the virtue of life. Chasing after high-quality and high-standard life is of no blame, but it should not be the ultimate goal of life. One ought to live a meaningful life, with a confidant or confidante, with a happy family and his or her responsibilities and obligation. Totally different from this spiritual-and-material life, the hotel manager

Hurstwood only lives in the corporeal world. Neither has he had a family nor taken up his job. What he simply owns are a house and a woman and what he has done is only showing off his fortune.

All in all, after ruminating on the book, I have a clearer mind of my life, of what one’s life should be, and I am determined to cling to my belief.