Review

Quotes

Page 25 >White > There’s nothing to follow. It’s all right. The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didnt know that. I thought they were indestructible. They werent.

Page 53 >Black >No. I didnt. I didnt know what I was. But I thought I was in charge. I never knowed what that burden weighed till I put it down. That might of been the sweetest thing of all. To just hand over the keys.

Page 65-66 >Black >Belief aint like unbelief. If you a believer then you got to come finally to the well of belief itself and then you dont have to look no further. There aint no further. But the unbeliever has got a problem. He has set out to unravel the world, but everything he can point to that aint true leaves two new things layin there. 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 dont have to worry about where it come from. But if he didnt 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. If light it is.. Includin yourself. One question fits all. So what do you think, Professor? Is you real?

Page 67 >Black >Maybe the notion of original sin. When Eve eat the apple and it turned everybody bad. I dont see people that way. I think for the most part people are good to start with. I think evil is somethin you bring on your own self. Mostly from wantin what you aint supposed to have. But I aint goin to set here and tell you about bein a heretic when I’m tryin to get you to quit bein one.

Page 76 >White >Well I still don’t get it. Why not go someplace where you might be able to do some good? >Black >As opposed to someplace where good was needed. >White >Even God gives up at some point. There’s no ministry in hell. That I ever heard of.

Page 91-92 >Black >But you wouldnt hurt them people. >White >No. Of course not. >Black >You sure. >White >Of course I’m sure. Why would I hurt them? >Black >I dont know. Why would you hurt yourself? >White >It’s not the same thing. >Black >You sure about that? >White >I’m not them and they’re not me. I think I know the difference. >Black >Mm.

Page 104 (re: telling someone the worst thing he’s ever done) >Black >Oh yeah. It wouldnt leave me alone. The soul might be silent but the servant of the soul has always got a voice and it has got one for a reason. The life of the master depends on the servant and this is one master that has got to be sustained. Got to be sustained.

Page 112 >White >The darker picture is always the correct one. When you read the history of the world you are reading a saga of bloodshed and greed and folly the import of which is impossible to ignore. And yet we imagine that the future will somehow be different. I’ve no idea why we are even still here but in all probability we will not be here much longer.

==Page 118== >Black >The point dont change. The point is always the same point. It’s what I said before and what I keep lookin for ways to say it again. The light is all around you, cept you dont see nothin but shadow. And the shadow is you. You the one makin it.

Review

One of my projects this year was to finish reading all of McCarthy’s works that I hadn’t yet. Without checking, I believe I’d read most or all of The Border Trilogy, The Road, Blood Meridian, and The Passenger series. I started on this because The Road is my favorite novel, and I am fascinated with the way that McCarthy writes. But really I started it because The Passenger and Stella Maris totally stumped me, they simply made no impression. So I felt I needed to go back through the collection and return to them, eventually.

The play, screenplay, and “novel in dramatic form” (I have no idea what that means, as it is indistinguishable from a play to my eyes) were challenges. No Country for Old Men is a novel, adapted into one of the best films of the 2000s by the Coen Brothers. Adapted almost word for word. Yet, I have trouble imagining the play and stageplay (and this novel) as successful adaptations. Part of that is because The Counselor (a screenplay) is not very good, and the film adaptation might be one of the worst film adaptations of the 2010s if it weren’t so bland and forgettable.

While not as bad as those, Sunset Limited certainly feels flat. It is a two-man play where the symbolism could not be any more direct. The characters are called White and Black. One is a white man, one is a black man (guess which is which). One is a suicidally depressed atheist, the other is a reformed criminal and believer in the Man Jesus (guess which is which).

For the first half, we dance around a little bit the direct confrontation of suicide. The Sunset Limited is the euphemism used for a character seeking to jump in front of a speeding train. That character has done the math, the train outruns the neurons (evidence of a kind of McCarthy verbiage that I like in his novels, but seems to struggle here).

As the pages dwindle you start to grow concerned that the story may not have a resolution. Ambiguity in endings is very Cormac, and he fulfills the brief. I do wonder if we are supposed to believe that a thing happens between the final closing lines, but I am also disinterested.

Ultimately, it comes down to a pretty rote discussion between an atheist and a believer, and it doesn’t do much for me. Because the discussion feels less about faith and doubt, and more about worldview. It isn’t White’s lack of faith that isolates him in his community. He clearly detests himself. So what does it matter whether he believes in god or not? Plenty of believers detest themselves. It felt like we were missing the point a little because Cormac wanted to poke at these ideas of faith and doubt alongside sociological worldview in a way that I don’t think exactly works. And I think when he does this poking in a different way, elsewhere (The Road), he is much more thoughtful about it, and more interesting.

I did flag some interesting exchanges, my favorite is probably on page 118:

BLACK: The point dont change. The point is always the same point. It’s what I said before and what I keep lookin for ways to say it again. The light is all around you, cept you dont see nothin but shadow. And the shadow is you. You the one makin it.

Earlier in the book, Black spoke of the light as a quasi-physical thing, a thing with weight. I like this thread of connection to “carrying the light” in The Road. This is also the line that most clearly gets at White’s context, I think. That it is not a lack of faith that has led him to this deeply cynical, self-murderous place. It’s that he has brought himself there, maybe hurried along by things we don’t know about.

Maybe part of my response is that White and I are very different kinds of faithless. I do not think that people are evil. I think we live in a world that hurts. We try to stave off the pain; we form connections, we fall for people, we mourn together. Some of us are lost. I don’t know if it is forever. But I think hurt, lost, people hurt other folks, too.

There is another exchange. White is asking Black why he lives in the slums (my word):

WHITE: Well I still don’t get it. Why not go someplace where you might be able to do some good? > >Black: As opposed to someplace where good was needed.

I don’t know how to connect that to any point that I’m making, if I’m trying to make one. But I like it. It makes me think about purpose. Black feels that he has a purpose, and I think that’s important for us. Not in a theological way, but in a way that we have a sense of belonging to one another. A responsibility, or commitment. I don’t have any idea what my purpose is, but my lack of faith doesn’t mean that I feel life is a waste of time. I hope it isn’t. I can’t look my friends in the face and think life a waste of time.

Yet, that is not exactly explored here. Every conversation feels like it is skirting around these ideas in favor of this belief / disbelief dichotomy.

I think I could ramble on a lot about these things and go nowhere. So, anyway, I think the book feels very flat. Similar to his other screenplay/play works, I think these themes are explored more fully and thoughtfully in his novels.

As an aside, there is a lot of literature out there on suicide from a theist perspective. There is less written for the atheist. The best book I have read towards this is Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It by Jennifer Michael Hecht. I found it in the UIC Library in 2013 and it saved my life back then.