Sunset Limited Themes

In The Sunset Limited, Black views compassion as the main thing—without it, you're in the dark, and the key to life everlasting is to love other people. White, on the other hand, doesn't view hum...

If anything is super clear in The Sunset Limited, it's that White isn't happy. If he was, he probably wouldn't be dressed up in his "leapin costume" ready to plunge in front of the train. Black, on...

White is all about his mind in The Sunset Limited, so he can't accept mercy and compassion because they don't make intellectual sense—they aren't just, and he thinks everything should be complete...

White is a profoundly isolated man in The Sunset Limited. He admits that he has no friends—except for someone he used to get lunch with at the university—and it seems he's estranged from his ow...

Although White and Black get pretty deep into arguing about religion in The Sunset Limited, they also transcend specific religious ideas in their arguments, getting broader and more philosophical t...

The Sunset Limited reflects on death, but not in the typical way—the characters aren't afraid of it. Black's faith leads him to believe in a "most excellent world" in the beyond, while White abso...

What McCarthy is trying to say about race in The Sunset Limited is sort of mysterious. He has something in mind, though, given that the two main characters are identified not by their names, but by...

Religion is an essential part of Black's life in The Sunset Limited, and plays no part in White's life, whatsoever. In trying to convince White not to kill himself, Black frequently couches his arg...

While White's the character who's overtly suffering in The Sunset Limited—he wants to kill himself, after all—both White and Blacktalk a lot about the suffering of the world and humanity in gen...