Literary Devices in Sunset Limited
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Setting
The setting is Black's apartment, in one of the poorer areas of New York City, during the present day. His tenement is populated by drug addicts and other desperate people, and he lets them crash o...
Narrator Point of View
Genre
This is a play, which means there are no two ways about it: It's a drama. That said, it isn't some fluffy comedy piece. Instead, The Sunset Limited hangs out in philosophical territory, with White...
Tone
The play, as you've no doubt noticed by now, gets into some pretty heady territory. We're talking about the meaning of life, the existence of God, the point of suffering, and all that doctorate-lev...
Writing Style
Although this is a serious play dealing with serious themes, McCarthy's willing to let the dialogue get pretty funny and down-home at times. Black will say, for instance: "They got a train for all...
What's Up With the Title?
The Sunset Limited is the title of a real Amtrak train, which travels from New Orleans to California. McCarthy applies the name to a fictional commuter train in New York City, though, the train tha...
What's Up With the Ending?
Your interpretation of the ending sort of depends on who you are as a reader. It seems, on the whole, to be pretty negative: Black never receives the inspiration he needs from God—he can't find t...
Tough-o-Meter
The Sunset Limited is a pretty easy read. Even when a character throws out some intellectual dialogue, or says something like "the dialectic of the homily presupposes a ground of evil" (to use the...
Plot Analysis
Dodging DeathAfter Black rescues White from his suicide attempt, they settle in at Black's apartment. They try to gain their footing around each other and the conversation quickly turns to religion...
Three-Act Plot Analysis
After White's failed suicide attempt, Black and White get their debate started with few preliminaries. They quickly sense each other's basic positions: the non-belief and anti-life views of White,...
Trivia
Cormac McCarthy once concocted a plot with his friend, the writer Edward Abbey, to reintroduce the wolf to the Southwestern U.S. We guess it never panned out. (Source)Fun fact: McCarthy knows...
Steaminess Rating
There's no sex in The Sunset Limited—unlike other Cormac McCarthy works, such as the movie The Counselor (which has some really weird stuff in it). However, if we weren't just talking about steam...
Allusions
The Book of Job (15)War and Peace (18)Blaise Pascal (122)W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939" (121)Franz Kafka (135)Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (19-20)Martin Luther...