THE SUNSET LIMITED

I just finished reading THE SUNSET LIMITED, a "novel in dramatic form" by Cormac McCarthy, which was his precursor to the Pulitzer-Prize winning THE ROAD (which Brett and I adapted into a screenplay before it got all Oprahfied and popular).

The book is sparse and good.  In a kind of modern Dostoevsky fashion, it directly engages the dialectic between faith and despair.  The plot is simple: a black man saves a white man from committing suicide (as if by accident), and takes him to his apartment where they discuss their lives, their opposing worldviews, and how the white man might be saved from completing his self-destructive mission.

Rather than provide answers or declare a winner of the debate, McCarthy effectively allows both sides of the debate to exist as equals, and leaves us with an appropriate sense of ambiguity.

McCarthy tries to create an irony around the fact that the man with the more "difficult" life is the man with faith.  "Black" (they are only referred to by color) spent time in prison, has had blood on his hands, lives amongst the poor and drug-dependent.  "White" is educated, a "professor" of some sort, and obviously does not lead a life of deserate means.  While it might be tempting to criticize McCarthy for equating faith with the uneducated, he provides Black type of worldly wisdom that, if only momentarily, may penetrate into something that White has hidden under his walls of intellectual atheism.  It's easy to recall the quiet wisdom of Witt in the face of Welsh from THE THIN RED LINE.

Still, one gets the sense that McCarthy may empathize more with White, in that even if his pessimism doesn't win the debate, its ambiguity always wins the narrative's conclusion.  And unlike THE GRAND INQUISITOR, where it is the intellecutal pragmatist who is given pause by a small act of gentle love, THE SUNSET LIMITED lingers on the faithful's difficulty in reconciling himself with the limits of his faith.

All of McCarthy's works deal with characters who wrestle with the existence of evil or, even worse, a void of meaning in the world.  THE SUNSET LIMITED may best be understood as his GRAND INQUISITOR: a microcosm of his larger work where the themes he wishes to explore are stripped down to their core and presented as a dialog-driven metaphor.   By no means his greatest work, it may be one of the most crtitical in understanding the primary mission of his narrative voice.

A few key passages:

BLACK: If God aint everything you need you in a world of trouble.  And if what you sayin is that my view of the world is a narrow one I dont dissagree witht that.  Of course I could point out that I aint down on the platform in my leapin costume.

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.

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 again.  The light is all around you, cept you dont see nothin but shadow.  And the shadow is you.  You the wone makin it.

WHITE: It's that the world is basically a forced labor camp from which the workers - perfectly innocent - are led forth by the lottery, a few each day, to be executed.  I dont think that this is just the way I see it.  I think it's the way it is.  Are there alternative views?  Of course.  Will any of them stand close scrutiny?  No.

WHITE:I dont regard my state of mind as some pessimistic view of the world.  I regard it as the world itself.  Evolution cannot avoid bringing intelligent life ultimately to an awareness of one thing above all else and that one thing is futility.

WHITE: Justice?  Brotherhood?  Eternal Life?  Good god, man.  Show me a religion that prepares one for death.  For nothingness.  There's a church I might enter.  Yours prepares one only for more life.  For dreams and illusions and lies.  If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldnt live a day.  Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next?  The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy...