The Sunset Limited - Dark Publications

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made.

In that small apartment, “Black” and “White,” as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men–though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it.

Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life.

Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deceptively intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time.

Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Straight To the Point January 8, 2007
19 out of 21 found this review helpful

In his brilliant book Existential Psychotherapy, the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom devotes an entire section to meaninglessness. As life has no objective meaning, we are left to construct our own. Yalom starts the section out hauntingly, with an actual suicide note of someone now dead from his own hand. In the note, the man describes a group of morons whose only purpose is to move bricks from one side of a yard to another, back and forth, without any reflection as to why. One day, one moron does so reflect and, from that day forward, is never as content to move the bricks as he was before. The author of the note states that he is that one moron.

That person, whose identity is unknown, could well be the character White, one of only two characters in this play by Cormac McCarthy. On the outside, he would seem to have things going for him. He is well educated, articulate and displays the mannerisms of someone comfortable in social class. Yet inside is an emptiness so profound that jumping in front of the Sunset Limited, a train, is seen as the only option. Indeed, White's outlook is so bleak that he does not view this as pessimistic, but rather as realistic and even something to embrace.

White's polar opposite is, not surprisingly, Black. He is the opposite of White in two ways. Externally, he is dirt poor, has a violent and misguided history and a life few would envy. More profoundly, however, is the polarity of what is inside. Black has a faith in the Bible, in Jesus, that infuses his life with a meaning totally lacking in White. Despite his hard circumstances, he sees a reason to live and to try to help White see such a reason as well.

The conversation between the two is simple yet profound. White's education and worldliness have left him with a powerful intellect but no guide to use it for personal fulfillment. Every attempt by Black to show White a path towards some light can easily be rationalized away. But this rationalization always leads back to the hard end of the Sunset Limited.

SUNSET LIMITED is very stripped down. It has one act, only two characters and even these characters are nameless except for their opposite descriptors. This allows for the dialogue and ideas to take center stage. As the conversation is about life, death and meaning, this is a good call by McCarthy. The starkness of the set-up is also a clue that McCarthy views the morality at issue to be absolute. SUNSET LIMITED is a short yet powerful read.

3 out of 5 stars

to be honest--3.75 stars (Iiked it, but with mild reservations) November 5, 2006
17 out of 18 found this review helpful

I am impressed by the scope and challenge of Cormac McCarthy's canon. This particular work is a little more akin to earlier works like _Child of God_ and _Outer Dark_, where the settings were a little more sparse and laced with symbolism. In this, however, McCarthy has pared himself down to minimal basics, and his symbolism thrives for that and tackles ideas more expansive than those earlier works. The two characters of this 'novel in dramatic form' are simply called White and Black, and the previous reviewer duly noted some of the dualistic connections through that simplicity. The mastery here works in that the connections are quite multifaceted--Black is simple in his dialect, yet addresses wonderful complexities and paradoxes of Christian thought, his ideas of God's design wonderfully circular and avoidant of easy rhetoric. White goes through much of this book a little too reactionary until the very end, but he is opposed to Black in so many ways. There are echoes here of racism, arguments in philosophy, hell and purgatory, and as I read I became aware of more and more possibilities.

The situation itself may sound somewhat high-schoolish in its almost adolescent initial stab at symbolism (Black, a simple religious man living in a ghetto, saves White, who is a professor and well-to-do intellectual, when White jumps in front of a subway train in a suicide attempt--Black brings White back to his home in the ghetto and takes this as an opportunity to proselytize), but McCarthy quickly establishes this initial angle so that the rest of his book can deepen the levels of meaning within this book. Being dramatic in its format, the narrative of course hinges primarily on dialogue between the two, and at its best moments that dialogue turns around on its own axle and examines endlessly the true meaning of salvation, of samaratinism, of hell and punishment.

Though I enjoyed the banter endlessly, I did find that I missed some McCarthy's uncanny ability to make even the most symbolic of situations grounded heavily in the earth--his ability to keep your feet on the floor and let you know that the story itself comes from a very concrete setting. _The Sunset Limited_ feels almost a little too Sartre-esque at times when Black says things like, "Do you know what's out there?" It lacks the handling of someone like Beckett, who could make something like a coffee pot or a dinner infused with mango and rutabaga so real and tactile that one can easily be distracted from metaphor for a while to enjoy the scenery, no matter how sparse. In _The Road_, for example, McCarthy deals with the big questions of what distinguishes man from beasts, but does so in a very palpable situation, even though alien. The desolate, post-apocalyptic world McCarthy created for that novel was wonderfully immediate and vivid, and perhaps for this book (play), he let his symbolism carry away the narrative, and his little moments of verisimilitude don't weigh as heavily as they have in other works.

Clearly, the ideas in this book will resonate long after reading them, and I love how McCarthy is becoming a writer who is willing to tackle the biggest questions of existence in very effective ways. I would give this book 3.5 stars if I could--exquisite in its ideas, though maybe a little less masterful in its execution.

2 out of 5 stars

Disappointing pseudoprofundity March 31, 2007
14 out of 24 found this review helpful

I read this book immediately after finishing Richard Dawkins "The God Delusion", which may have been a mistake because I could not help thinking a much more interesting play would have three people at the table, the third being Dawkins who would mop the floor with these two sorry saps. Neither Black or White offer much of anything that is profound, hopeful, or insightful. Black carries the flag for the faithful, willingly accepting his dismal life because he'll eventually be gwine up to hebben; White carries the flag for those without faith, unwilling to accept his dismal life because of the crushing weight of his unbelief. Neither man is going about the business of living. Maybe that's the point - life isn't black and white - but to whom is this a revelation?

McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Suttree, and border trilogy are among my most favorite books. I miss the author who wrote so wonderfully. The exceedingly spare prose of his most recent books is wearing very thin.

4 out of 5 stars

Is it all worth it? October 29, 2006
10 out of 11 found this review helpful

Here we have issues of life and death talked over by an erudite, nihilistic white professor and the earthy, plain-speaking black ex-con who prevents him from jumping off a subway platform and takes him home. Black -- as he's identified in the dialogue -- makes a compelling case for valuing community, caring for others, respecting Biblical wisdom, rebounding from setbacks, refusing to believe that life is worthless. In the face of that, White doggedly hangs on to his belief in nothing other than life's futility.

The work of other writers resonates here. White reminds me of some of Flannery O'Connor's characters who are confounded by their own intellect, "the primacy of the intellect" as White puts it. His claustrophobic urgency to get out of his predicament recalls Sartre's No Exit, and his renunciation of religion calls up some of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. What makes this book more accessible is the presence of American voices, although some readers might find Black's inauthentic. Black calls White "honey" a few times, conjuring up conversations between Jim and Huck. Twain's ear for dialect may be better than McCarthy's, but this is still a worthwhile read.

5 out of 5 stars

Another trophy for McCarthy December 10, 2006
8 out of 11 found this review helpful

The man never ceases to amaze me. In this short play with two characters [Black and White] and in just one room McCarthy exposes us to a vain attempt by an uneducated black with a love of the bible and a heart as big as Texas to save an educated white professoer full of useless, or wasted, education on his way to death. Ending tragically, as most McCarthy books do, it none-the less shows the power of determination: one in himself and the task at hand and the other in a belief in a higher power and a hope for His ability to intervene.

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