(2006) The Sunset Limited

The truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why?

Plot Summary

The play opens in a tenement building room in the ghettos of New York. Black—a reformed convict—has just saved White, a nihilistic professor, who has jumped in front of a train named The Sunset Limited to commit suicide. As the play progresses, Black attempts to convince White that life is worth living. Black realizes he must keep White interested. Thus, he tells White stories of his life in the jailhouse, serves him delicious food, and creates unique phrases to describe White and his situation. As Black uses these devices to keep White in the room rather than on the tracks, Black also tries to convince White that there is meaning in life grounded in the existence of God. Most of the time, Black seems to be in complete control as he subjects White to yes or no questions about the nature of reality. However, at the end of the play, White rejects all of Black’s attempts, elucidating his own vision of the world characterized by despair and nothingness. White then leaves the room, as Black calls out to him and prays to a mute God.

Critical Analysis

Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road may be read quickly as a simple and sentimental travel novel about a man and a boy. However, a closer analysis of the religious, philosophical, and ethical aspects of the novel that also figure prominently also in his play, The Sunset Limited, reveals a depth to McCarthy’s works that make them a significant contribution to the literary canon.

In her article, “ ‘The lingerin sense of divinity’ in The Sunset Limited and The Road,” Susan J. Tyburski claims that “The Road, in many ways, picks up where The Sunset Limited left off” (Tyburski 124). In both The Sunset Limited and The Road, the breakdown of language is a harbinger of the world’s immanent destruction. In SL, White says,

The truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why? (58)

Similarly, the father in The Road sees

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality (89).

McCarthy’s texts refute philosophical absolutism, instead addressing ambiguities that enshrine postmodern life. With the Sunset Limited, the form of questioning is a philosophical dialogue that ends without a clear resolution; in contrast The Road does not concern eternal truth but the ambiguous realm between ethics and aesthetics. Thus, for example, in The Road McCarthy re-imagines Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: “In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast” (R 3). As Alex Hunt and Martin Jacobsen point out, “McCarthy’s allegory of the cave is not about getting out to the sun and to illuminated wisdom, but about going in deeper, lost in the darkness with a fading light” (Hunt and Jacobsen 157). Indeed,The Road abandons traditional notions of philosophical “Truth.” A look at the possible perspectives provided by Black and White inThe Sunset Limited leaves the reader to weigh foundational metaphysical issues.

The reader is tempted to associate Black’s worldview with the father in The Road, but there are significant contrasts. Black, unlike the father, may reach out a helping hand to others, such as White and the junkies in his building. But, as Susan Tyburski points out, “[u]nlike black, the man does not have a front door with a bizarre collection of locks to keep out the threatening darkness surrounding him” (Tyburski 126). Indeed, Black may only take on a “challenge” if it does not involve any risks to his own deep-seated beliefs. Thus, even though Black is surrounded by darkness, he prefers to think of the world in the opposite way: “The light is all around you, cept you don’t see nothing but shadow. And the shadow is you. You the one makin it” (SL 50). In contrast, the father inThe Road is all too aware of the threatening dark forces in the world he inhabits, a world anticipated by White.By the endof Sunset Limited White’s conception of the world, may be as black and white as his counterpart, but initially he seems to occupy a grayer position:

BLACK: That’s the way it is. Ain’t it?
WHITE: I suppose.
BLACK: No, you don’t suppose. Is it or ain’t it?
WHITE: Yes. (17)

Black is the one who seems to force White to pick a side—light or darkness. This binary between black and White is Black’s primary blindness:

WHITE: You see everything in black and white.
BLACK: It is black and white.
WHITE: I suppose that makes the world easier to understand. (45)

Even God is black and white for Black. He explains that “If God walked the earth when he got done makin it then when you get up in the mornin’ you get to put your feet on a real floor and you don’t have to worry about where it come from. But if he didn’t then you got to come up with a whole other description of what you even mean by real. And you got to judge everything by that same light”(SL 30). For Black, the world is real or it is not; either he is sent down to save White, or he cannot make sense of why he encountered him. Black may deny that he tries to understand the nature of God, but he boldly proclaims, “I try and understand what he wants from me” (SL 45).

The Road, rather than clearly distinguishing between black and white dwells in the gray area of human existence ethics. As the previous world fades away, along with its language and culture, meaning can only be formed through human actions and relationships. In The Sunset Limited, Black and White are engaged in an endless argument concerning the nature of reality. The other method of ‘argument’ in The Sunset Limited is story. Black’s “trick bag” is a metaphor for his methods of seduction, which, according to Diane Luce, are “stories or food” (Luce 19). Likewise, in The Road, the father tries to keep alive “Old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them until the boy was asleep in his blankets” (R 41). Both Black and the father’s stories seem comforting. However, both the boy and White ultimately reject such comforts. The boy loses faith in his father’s stories because he recognizes the incongruity between the actions of fictional characters and their own actions. The father may frame himself and the boy as “the good guys,” but the boy points out that they do not fit these roles: “But in the stories we’re always helping people and we don’t help people” (R 121, 268). In such moments in the text, we return to the ethical question: what is considered good?

While the good in The Sunset Limited depends on metaphysical perspective, The Road takes place in a world where metaphysics has become irrelevant, and goodness is seen in the collaboration between father and son rather than philosophical dialectic. For instance, the word “okay,” used frequently in The Road, only appears at the end of SL as Black questions God: “Is that okay? Is that okay?” (SL 60). The characters in The Road must decide how to act in the world, which involves agreement between the father and the son, “each the other’s world entire” (R 6). In “Mapping The Road in Post-Postmodernism,” Linda Woodson argues that “the oft-repeated phrase “okay” functions as a primal response, useful in many ways as agreement, understanding with or without agreement, reassurance, and the end of discussion” (Woodson 94). For Woodson, “the argument of the book is that language can convey more about the essence of living authentically, than the actual meaning of the words in combination can describe, that nonverbal understandings accompany the words on the page” (Woodson 95).

White gets at a similar idea but does not draw adequate conclusions. Unlike Black, who sees language as a tool for seduction, White realizes that words (books, culture, Reason) without results have no meaning, as he states, “The things I believed in don’t exist anymore. It’s foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the Chimneys at Dachau [. . .] I see it now” (SL 14-15). White realizes that in such an unethical, unjust world—though he claims that he does not believe in justice—life is meaningless. However, White has foreclosed his possibilities of ethical action because he isolates himself from the human community. Black has also isolated himself from human relationships, choosing to dwell among junkies who have no ethical agency left.

While ethics remain in the background of The Sunset Limited’s discussions, The Road, where actions towards other human beings are the only evidence for good left in the world, directly engages the meaning of ethical actions. In “Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy’sThe Road,” Philllip Snyder argues that The Road’s ethical stance maps onto an ethics of the Other derived from the thought of Emannuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Jacqued Derrida derives the term “hostipitality” from the French term hôte, meaning both “host” and “guest.” Derrida’s idea is best presented by the boy’s prayer to the absent and mysterious benefactors who stored food in a bunker that saved the father and son from starvation; “Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldn’t eat it no matter how hungry we were and we’re sorry that you didn’t get to eat it and we hope that you’re safe in heaven with God” (R 146). Snyder argues that this prayer “illustrates the boy’s sense of responsibility as hôte as he acknowledges his hosting power in presiding over this first meal while understanding that he also remains a guest of the absent host” (Snyder 84). 
Thus, even in a world where the forms of things have been emptied of their content, we search for new content and new forms of meaning. Black argues that one must, “Innovate,” when (White speaking) “you don’t have something that you want” (43-44). Both Black and White depend on their own metaphysics to lead them to definite answers, rather than working together in creative innovation.

In contrast, the father in The Road innovates by “evok[ing] the forms” because “Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them” (74). The boy also constructs a ceremony when he gives the secular prayer to the people for providing them with food (R 146). Perhaps this is the meaning of the old man’s declaration that “There is no god and we are his prophets” (R 170). The boy realizes he is one who has to worry about everything—not his father (R 259), and he must collaborate in creating the world he will inhabit when his father dies. The Road shows that even as the ethical world disappears, human relationships flourish in deeds, stories, and most especially in language McCarthy lyrically employs in his works. Thus, despite the philosophical skepticism of The Road and Sunset Limited, both present ethics forever wedded to aesthetics, with beauty as a kind of form of forms, a new style of neo-Platonism in which ambiguity is itself a value and aesthetics a vehicle for exploring the many truths that comprise existence. 

by Jacob T. Riley