In The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form (2006), a white man and black man (named in the text simply as "White" and "Black") argue about whether life has meaning. The white man is a college professor who has just been prevented from throwing himself in front of a subway train by the black man, a reformed ex-convict. The white man believes life has no meaning and wants to die. The black man is a converted Christian who says that Jesus often talks to him. He feels responsible for the white man he has rescued, responsible not only for preventing him from another suicide attempt but also for the salvation of his soul.
The train which the white man attempted to use as the means of his extinction is the Sunset Limited, and this name becomes in this dramatic debate a label for the end of all human life—human mortality, death. Does life mean anything in the face of inevitable extinction? Is death the end of things? These issues this play explores.
Racial considerations do not seem an issue here. Still, the two characters represent some uncomfortable distinctions. The white man is the voice of despair, nihilism, rationalism. The black man is the voice of hope, belief, faith. He also talks in an ungrammatical dialect that occasionally verges on a stereotype, though he is intelligent and articulate. The play refers to him as "the black." What are these distinctions supposed to imply? The play might not directly address issues of race and racism in the interplay of its two characters, but it does raise and suggest them. The true focus lies elsewhere.
These two men are like good and bad angels for the writer of this play which, though it has been staged, is more like a closet drama than a work intended for performance. Cormac McCarthy is the writer, of course, the author of such dark novels as Outer Dark, Child of God, Blood Meridian, and The Road. One of the central issues in The Road is whether, in a world that has essentially come to an end and that is doomed to darkness and lifelessness, there is any reason for the few survivors to struggle on. In that novel, a dying father's love for his young son is the sole justification for that struggle, and even then the father wonders whether killing his son would be more an act of love than dying and leaving him alone in a dead world.
McCarthy often verges on nihilism. In All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, he allows his leading characters to survive, though they must live with the knowledge of all they have lost—a stoic and highly compromised survival, such as the one allowed Harry Wilbourne at the end of Faulkner's novel The Wild Palms—"between grief and nothingness, I'll take grief."
The Sunset Limited comes to no real conclusion. The two men talk and argue and debate, and on several occasions one seems on the verge of winning over or at least of outtalking the other. This is especially true when the black man serves the white man food and they eat together. Finally, however, neither convinces the other. Although the black man rarely seems at a loss for words, at the end the white man explains to him how he is in love with the prospect of death and then walks out the door. The black man calls him back, but receives no response. The play ends. It would be the conventional ending to have the unbeliever tempted towards belief, but here the opposite seems the case—the believer shaken in his own certain convictions.
Why does this debate matter to McCarthy? He seems to have made his choice—for rationalism, darkness. He is in his 70s now, and in The Road he made clear how he was thinking about the prospects of death. Here, In the Sunset Limited, he offers further thoughts on the subject. It is tempting to see in the white character of this play McCarthy's own projection of himself, and in the black man a representation of the compulsions towards faith that, in the face of one's own inevitable end, may act more strongly than they have before. Yet he still rejects them.
One point this play makes clearly: though the voices of faith and rationalism may attempt to converse, in the end there is no possibility of agreement. They are divided by an irreconcilable difference of conviction, a gap that cannot be closed.
Despite the claim in the subtitle, The Sunset Limited is not a novel. It is a play and a philosophical debate. It is longer than it needs to be. McCarthy's tendency towards philosophizing has occasionally been a weakness in his novels—I think especially of The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, both of which contain overlong moments of philosophical discussion. Here the main points of the disagreement between the two characters are expressed repeatedly in a way that doesn't seem to advance the plot in any particular direction, leaving us at the end where we were at the beginning. Perhaps this is one of the points.
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