"The Sunset Limited:" Reality Might Be Relative

Cormac McCarthy entitled the play as The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Fashion. According to the artistic director of the original production, Martha Levy, the choice to use "the stage as a venue for this conversation suggests he sees the drama of The Sunset Limited as one best unmediated by the narrative voice..." A very interesting thought. McCarthy is handing over the controls to someone else. How the story unfolds is up to the conversation between two men. The story is not dictated by a single point of view. The story is dictated by a conversation, by what these two men say.

I'm not sure that this is a completely formed thought, but here we are. It is interesting to think about the power of the point of view. As human beings, our point of view determines everything about our lives. It is how we see the world and the people in it. It informs every choice we make, whether good or evil. (Good intentions or not) That's a pretty big deal. It also informs much of the our two characters in The Sunset Limited. They have two completely different points of view and not surprisingly, butt-heads all through the show. Fortunately, it is left up to us to decide who was right. Unfortunately, who we decide is informed by our point of view. You can't get away from it.

Neither of these are fully formed thoughts at the moment because my mind is still blowing up thinking of these two things in this way. For a novelist to write a novel without a narrative voice is, at least for me, unheard of. To give up at least some of the control of his work is headache inducing. To really think about our point of view causes some pretty late nights and heady thinking. It brings questions to mind about the nature of reality. For that matter, in what reality do we, as individuals on the same plane, live in? Do we even live in the same plane? Who knows.