The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form [Paperback]

Cormac McCarthy (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 24, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A brilliantly articulated piece, penned by a wildly acclaimed fiction writer. Nothing short of dazzling. So astonishingly effecting, so powerful, so stimulating!” –Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Cormac McCarthy is the author of nine novels, among other literary works. His many honors include the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 24, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307278360
• ISBN-13: 978-0307278364
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.4 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #92,337 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He later went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy's editor there was Albert Erskine, William Faulkner's long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of his next novel, Outer Dark. In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press. In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon thereafter, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing; the third volume, Cities of the Plain, was published in 1998.McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago and published in paperback by Vintage Books. McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was published in 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize.

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#52 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 49 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Straight To the Point January 8, 2007

By Dash Manchette VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

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.

37 of 40 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars to be honest--3.75 stars (Iiked it, but with mild reservations) November 5, 2006

By Mr. Richard K. Weems

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Is it all worth it? October 29, 2006

By R. Goldstein

Format:Paperback

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.