With a painstaking documentation of detail, Dreiser portrays three different worlds in which Sister Carrie moves and which between them offer a panoramic view of the crude and the savage aspects of social life at the turn of the twentieth century: these include her sister's working-class existence, her life with Druet in Chicago, and with Hurstwood in New York. Every detail is related with an amazing dispassionate exactitude and so assumes a sense of importance. Clothes, furniture, how much one owes the grocer, and exactly how much one earns and spends, the contents of a meal-all these indicate the plight of the heroine and her desire for a better life. The world is cold and harsh to her. Alone and helpless, she moves along like a mechanism driven by desire and catches blindly at any opportunities for a better existence, opportunities as offered first by Druet and then by Hurstwood. A feather in the wind, she is totally at the mercy of forces she cannot comprehend, still less to say control.