Today I read the play ‘The Sunset Limited’ by Cormac McCarthy. The play only consists of two characters, one named Black and one White. These titles of the people in the play immediately made me understand that the characters were going to be polar opposites and have differing opinions, and this is true, Black is an ex-convict and White is university professor. The play is a discussion/debate about how people view their lives and the quality of it, it speaks of religion, happiness and how a person’s experiences changes the way they think about things. White is suicidal and in the morning prior to this conversation, Black had stepped in to stop him ending his life via the mythical Sunset Limited (the train that takes you to the edge of the world and keeps on going), a metaphor for the subway train he was about to jump in front of.
I found this book really engaging and it made me think about different people’s perceptions of happiness. I think this could be a really interesting topic to explore with a visual project and it could be expanded to look at how peoples opinions differ on other topics such as religion and whether there is something beyond the world we live in.
The character names of Black and White triggers the theme of opposites which is something that could easily be translated into imagery, it also made me think about symmetry and how something can be symmetrical in shape but the contents are entirely different. This is something I think I need to explore with my sketchbook to see if I can translate this onto paper.
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