Carrie arrives in Chicago and confronts the brutal reality of industrial labor. She moves in with her sister, works in a shoe factory, falls ill, and faces destitution. Drouet reappears with money and charm.

Carrie's life with Drouet introduces her to comfort and society. Through Drouet she meets Hurstwood, whose polish and authority represent a higher rung on the ladder of desire. The love triangle develops as Hurstwood pursues Carrie with consuming intensity.

Hurstwood's wife discovers the affair and demands a ruinous settlement. Desperate, Hurstwood finds the safe at his saloon open with ten thousand dollars inside. In one of American literature's most ambiguous scenes, he takes the money. He tricks Carrie onto a train to Montreal, and their flight begins.

In New York, Hurstwood's decline accelerates as he fails to reestablish himself. Meanwhile Carrie discovers theatrical talent. Their trajectories cross and then separate -- she rises as he falls, and neither trajectory has anything to do with moral desert.

Hurstwood descends through New York's strata of poverty -- from failed businessman to job-seeker to day laborer to beggar to flophouse resident. He turns on the gas in a cheap room and dies. Dreiser renders the death with the same neutrality he brought to every other transaction in the novel.

Carrie achieves everything she wanted -- fame, money, luxury, admiration. She sits in the Waldorf hotel in a rocking chair and is not happy. The novel ends with Dreiser addressing her directly, telling her she will dream of a happiness she will never feel.