The Sunset Limited Annotated Bibliography

Carlson, Thomas A. “With the World at Heart: Reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with Heidegger and Augustine.” Religion and Literature 2007 Autumn 39 (3): 47-71.

Thomas Carlson explores the significance of losing ‘the world’ around us. Drawing on theories from Martin Heidegger and St. Augustine, he argues that in our everyday existence we lose ourselves in idle talk and curiosity. Only when the world as we know it is taken away from us can we come to face our true selves and our relation to the world around us. Rather than a world composed of things, this world consists of the meaning we give to our existence, which is composed of relationships with others. Carlson argues that the father’s hope in a possible world for his son in this second sense, allows them to imbue life with meaning.

Edwards, Tim. “The End of the Road: Pastoralism and the Post-Apocalyptic Waste Land of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 2008 Autumn 6: 55-61.

Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that we could discover truth by looking at nature. Tim Edwards argues that McCarthy presents a text lacking a clear picture of truth behind it. Edwards points out that the absence of the sun, references to blindness, and images of death and destruction show that Emerson’s transcendental vision is clouded in McCarthy. While there are moments where the father remembers idyllic scenes from the past, even these memories are tainted with words that recall his present situation. Thus, McCarthy shows that we could never return to a better world because there has never been such a thing.

Ellis, Jay. “Another Sense of Ending: The Keynote Address to the Knoxville Conference.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 2008 Autumn 6: 22-46.

Jay Ellis focuses on the relationship between the father and son in The Road. Ellis argues that the father and son connection is in some ways a flawed one. Drawing on theories of Jacques Lacan, Ellis argues that the world of The Road is the symbolic world, the world of the Father. While the son has not completely entered that symbolic world, the father trapped within its confines. Ellis points out that the father tries to keep himself busy in the world with parodic acts of skillful doing so as to have a sense of control. For example, Ellis points out that the closest the father comes to a customary role of the mother is to be forever shopping. Indeed, the father’s acts are impotent attempts at motherhood. While it is impossible to fix the world by a re-integration of women, the boy’s role in the new family (complete with a motherly figure) suggests a new level of independence. However, Ellis recognizes that the prince of the full family is the same as the father and son: they too are on the road and subject to the dangers that abound in McCarthy’s bleak fictional world.

Gallivan, Euan. “Compassionate McCarthy?: The Road and Schopenhauerian Ethics.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal. 2008 Autumn 6: 98-106.

Drawing on Schopenhauer’s pessimistic idealism, Gallivan argues that the acts of the father and the son can be judged in light of his ethics. Schopenhauer believed that we think the self is the center of the world, opposed to everything else. This fundamental belief is the cause of egoism which leads to violence. Wrongdoing in this sense is limiting the will of another being. However, right and wrong are distinguished from an act of moral worth. For an act to have moral worth, we must realize that an individual separate from others is an illusion and that each individual will is part of a larger will. Gallivan argues that the boy in The Road grasps this concept, as he frequently acts in ways completely absent of egoistic motivation.

Hunt, Alex and Martin H. Jacobsen. “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Plato’s Simile of the Sun.” Explicator 2008 Spring 66 (3): 155-158.

Hunt and Jacobson argue that The Road is an inversion of Platonism. Plato argued that there were eternal ideas that were more real than their physical copies in this world. Instead of believing in an eternal idea, the loss of physical form exposes the contingency of the idea; instead of coming out of the cave into the light of sun, the characters delve deeper into the darkness with only a fading light to guide them. McCarthy’s world is devoid of absolute truth. Instead of reading this as a possibly transformative ethical situation, Hunt and Jacobsen read the absence of Platonic truth as the end of civilization. However, McCarthy’s text suggests this may be the condition for the possibility of a new understanding of existence.

Luce, Diane C. “Beyond the Border: Cormac McCarthy in the New Millenium.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal.2008Autumn 6: 6-11.

Luce explains the biographical genesis of The Road: “The Road had its genesis in a very specific moment, when McCarthy had checked in an old hotel in El Paso with his young son, John [. . .] and stood looking at the still city at two or three in the morning from the window of their room, hearing the lonesome sound of trains and imagining what El Paso ‘might look like in fifty or a hundred years.’ ‘I just had this image of these fires up on the hill and everything being laid waste and I thought a lot about my little boy. And so I wrote those pages and that was the end of it. At the time, he did not think of this as the germ of a novel, [. . .] then a few years later, in Ireland, he ‘woke up one morning and…realized’ that it was indeed a novel, ‘and that it was about that man and that little boy” (Luce 9). Thus, Luce gives us insight into McCarthy’s motivations for the novel.

Palmer, Louis. “The Road Rewrites The Orchard Keeper.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 2008 Autumn 6: 62-68.

Louis Palmer argues that by reading The Road as an elegy, we can explore the complex relationship between personal and broader historical mourning. He begins his analysis with Freud’s distinction between melancholy and mourning: melancholia is mourning run amuck. In The Road, the father is the melancholic resists death only to help his son through the mourning process. Once the son is done mourning, the father dies. Along with many critics who believe McCarthy’s worldview to be informed by ‘ecopastoralism,’ Palmer maintains that The Road is also an extended mourning for Nature itself. Finally, he suggests that the ending image of the trout in the stream is a reminder of what we have not yet lost but what we still may. For Palmer, the scene’s only consolation is to suggest that we have certain personal, cultural, and historical responsibilities.

Snyder, Phillip A. “Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 2008 Autumn 6: 69-86.

Phillip Snyder argues that the The Road advocates the radical ethics developed from the thought of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. The upshot of their ethics is that we are not only ethically bound to our family, friends, and the immediate others we encounter, but also to every other person past, present, and future. Snyder borrows Derrida’s neologism, hostipitality, to argue that the boy recognizes that we are never merely a host or a guest, but both hosts and guests. The most concrete example given is the boy’s prayer--not to God--but to the people who have left the boy and his father a store of food in a bunker they discover. He understands that he is both a host of the meal at hand, but also that he is a guest in the absent person’s home. Thus, The Road suggests a secular ethics qualified by religious ritual.

Tyburski, Susan J. “‘The lingering scent of divinity’ in The Sunset Limited and The Road.’” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 2008 Autumn 6: 121-128.

In this article, Susan Tyburski makes a case that McCarthy found inspiration from Christian mystics such as Pseudo-Dionysius, who maintained that God could only be encountered through a stripping away of the physical and mental trappings of this world, immersing oneself in the darkness of unknowing. Thus, darkness in The Road may not wholly represent despair and loss.Comparing and contrasting Black with the father and White with the son, Tyburski argues, like many critics, that the son contains a hint of divinity. However, though Black believes he is the messenger of the divine in The Sunset Limited, Tyburski compares the child to White. Thus, Tyburski suggests that by reading The Roadalongside The Sunset Limited, we complicate easy perspectives on White and Black. The Road seems to show that even within the dark worldview of the professor, we can make the world meaningful by grasp[ing] at remembered fragments of the former world, and evoking rituals to keep darkness at bay.

Vanderheide, John. “Sighting Leviathan: Ritualism, Daemonism, and the Book of Job in McCarthy’s latest works.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 2008 Autumn 6: 107-120.

In this article, John Vanderheide argues that White is sent to help Black rather than the other way around. Vanderheide identifies White with the Leviathan of Job because of White’s color, atheism, his mention of the book of Job, and his hypothetically imputed reptilian aspect. Using David Wolfer’s influential reading of Job, Vanderheide argues that the story of Job is God attempting to get rid of Job’s daemonism, or one-sidedness. Like Job, who thinks that God will reveal and explain his actions, Black thinks that if he waits long enough God will show him how he is supposed to save White. However, Black does not consider the possibility that White might have been sent to cure Black of this vision of the world, just as God attempts to rid Job of his wish for God to explain himself. While the play ends with Black asking God “why,” continuing to think that he is supposed to save White, Vanderheide argues that the father inThe Road may reach Job’s eventual insight into his situation.

Walsh, Chris. “The Post-Southern Place of The Road.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 2008 Autumn 6:48-54.

Chris Walsh reads the novel as a reinvigoration of Southern, American mythic, and imaginative categories. Walsh notes that the South acts as a redemptive agency when all else seems to have vanished. Indeed, the father keeps saying that they are heading south. Walsh argues that McCarthy can be framed within the American mythic paradigm of longing for a boundless and uncontaminated space, corresponding to the myth of the frontier. According to Walsh,The Road succeeds in reviving the most cherished geocentric American myth of the frontier, of a new physical, imaginative, and spatial beginning.

Wilhelm, Randal S. “ ‘Golden chalice, good to house a god’: Still Life in The Road.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal.2008Autumn 6: 129-146.

Randal Wilhelm argues that readers should interpret scenes in The Road as if they were still life paintings. For instance, the first meal scene could be read as “Still Life with Cornmeal cakes, syrup, and pistol.” Echoing Neo-Platonist theories of beauty, Wilhelm asserts that we find the good within the beautiful. Wilhelm explicates the scene where the father sits by a candle and the son by the hearth, interpreting the candle and the hearth symbolically, and claiming that the dying candle near the father represents his impending death, just as the hearth represents the burning fire the boy carries with him. As in a still life, by looking at the relations between objects, including positions of human beings, Wilhelm claims we can glimpse the ‘subject’ of the scene.

Woodson, Linda. “Mapping The Road in Post-Postmodernism.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 2008Autumn 6: 87-96.

Linda Woodson claims that The Road can be read as a journey narrative. She argues that The Road contains the postmodern understanding of language, which holds that language consists of many signifiers without a definitive reference. Despite this postmodern background, she argues that the novel’s main argument is that language can convey more about the essence of living authentically than the actual meaning of the words in combination can describe; nonverbal understandings accompany the words on the page. Using Austin’s speech-act theory, she claims that concepts such as courage and love are presented in [their] essentialist form as actions rather than meanings. Thus, like the journey narrative, McCarthy’s novel uses language to point beyond itself to reveal that which does not require language to understand.