Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy's new play packs all the wallop of his gut-wrenching fiction. "The Sunset Limited," though, is not about blood and guts but about the battle for the human soul.

A Novel in Dramatic Form

The Sunset Limited

Willing to bet this'll be my least favorite Cormac book and I'm just happy it was a short one.

This isn't a book but a play, a "novel in dramatic form". I found the conversation between Black and White to be quite boring and actually surprisingly shallow coming from Cormac McCarthy. Being a play, this is entirely void of McCarthy's verbose descriptions and instead just ankle-deep philosophy from a man known for making characters whose entire purpose was to spout such matter.

Thankfully this is short. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, and I was kinda tempted to give this 1 star instead of 2, but I did find it to be an easy read. The back-and-forth was fine, just dull, and it ends on a rather dour note (even for Cormac). Dour, but I don't think I learned anything along the way as I have in his other dour novels. I really was disappointed with the ending, this was not a great ride.

I do not recommend "The Sunset Limited", even for McCarthy fans. I guess if you need to complete your collection, you can breeze through this, thankfully. But for everyone else? This can be avoided.

Evan

Willing to bet this'll be my least favorite Cormac book and I'm just happy it was a short one.

  

This isn't a book but a play, a "novel in dramatic form". I found the conversation between Black and White to be quite boring and actually surprisingly shallow coming from Cormac McCarthy. Being a play, this is entirely void of McCarthy's verbose descriptions and instead just ankle-deep philosophy from a man known for making characters whose entire purpose was to spout such matter.

  

Thankfully this is short. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, and I was kinda tempted to give this 1 star instead of 2, but I did find it to be an easy read. The back-and-forth was fine, just dull, and it ends on a rather dour note (even for Cormac). Dour, but I don't think I learned anything along the way as I have in his other dour novels. I really was disappointed with the ending, this was not a great ride.

  

I do not recommend "The Sunset Limited", even for McCarthy fans. I guess if you need to complete your collection, you can breeze through this, thankfully. But for everyone else? This can be avoided.

Interesting read between two vastly different characters and their respective ideologies. As someone with neither of their views, watching them "battle" it out through conversation was intriguing. 

Isabella Chiara Vicco 

Jade Flynn

A quote from Alan Bennett perfectly sums up my thoughts "The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead." This is one book I'm never going to be finished with. A few times in your life you will stumble across a book that not only will you wholeheartedly understand but most importantly, you will find that it understands you. For me, this is it. More than any other piece of text that I've ever read. Sunset Limited felt like it was written for me personally. And that's one heck of a magical but scary thing. 

I'm going to share some of the 36 quotes I tabbed. 

White - It is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal

Black - No. I didn't 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

Black - It's just a train platform. Aint nothin else much you can say about it. But they might be one commuter waitin there on the edge of that platform that for him it;s somethin else. It might even be the edge of the world. The edge of the universe. He's startin at the end of all tomorrows and he's drawin a shade over every yesterday that ever was. So he's a different kind of commuter. He's worlds away from them everyday travelers

Black - The whole point of where this is goin - which you wanted to know - is that they aint no jews. No whites. Aint no niggers. People of color. Aint none of that. At the deep bottom of the mine where the gold is at there aint none of that. There's just the pure ore. That forever thing. That you dont think is there. That thing that helps keeps folks nailed down to the platform where the Sunset Limited comes through. Even when they think they might want to get aboard. The thing that makes it possible to ladle out benediction upon the heads of strangers instead of curses. It's all the same thing. And it aint but one thing. Just one

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

Full of rich dialogue, Cormac McCarthy's insightful and philosophical play, The Sunset Limited, probes the deepest questions of human existence. 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 diametrically opposing world views, they begin a dialectic redolent of the best of Beckett. 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 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 by Cormac McCarthy is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deeply intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time.

The Sunset Limited A Novel in Dramatic Form