'The Light is all around you, cept you don't see nothing but shadow': narratives of religion and race in The Stonemason and the Sunset Limited.

Abstract

Cormac McCarthy makes copious references to God and Christianity throughout his novels and plays, and a key concern of McCarthy scholarship involves an exploration of the role and meaning of the sacred in the fictional worlds he creates. However, there is a remarkable and intriguing difference between how McCarthy represents the idea of God and religious faith in most of his novels as compared to his dramatic writing. In this essay, I focus on the significance of religion in The Stonemason (1994) and The Sunset Limited (2006). Specifically, my aim is to analyze how the verbal signs of religion, race, masculinity and American national identity intersect in the texts. I explore how the role of religion in the plays functions to tell a different story about the American self, one that radically diverges from the dominant cultural narrative by virtue of decentering white masculinity.