'The Sunset Limited' by Cormac McCarthy is a thought-provoking piece centered around a dialogue between two characters, Black and White, with opposing beliefs about religion and life. The book delves into deep conversations about faith, the meaning of life, and the human condition. Written in a play format, the story explores themes of existentialism, nihilism, faith, and the complexities of human nature through the interactions between the two characters.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
The content warnings include discussions about suicide, existential despair, and themes of nihilism.
From The Publisher:
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.
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1 comment(s)
Ngl, I don’t know what to do with
The Sunset Limited. I don’t hate the work, but I have a hard time accepting that the message of the work is
life is meaningless, so you should just k*ll yourself.
I also have a hard time believing that McCarthy was just like, “I’m going to make two characters and call them Black and White, to show that the issue is black and white; both perspectives can’t simultaneously be valid. Later, I will have White eviscerate Black’s argument to show that only White’s perspective is correct (e.g.
life is meaningless, so you should just k*ll yourself
).”
If this is the message of the work, and as someone who has been suicidal in the past, then I can’t endorse the work in good faith, but I’m glad the work made me think.
I also don’t enjoy McCarthy’s depiction of Black in what appears to be a stereotype of Black people, and I’m not sure McCarthy is allowed to write the N-word as a white person.
What can you read after
The Sunset Limited?
About the Author:
Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright who has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A number of his works have been adapted into films, including All the Pretty…
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