Wednesday 17 December 2014

Expressões conotativas em Sunset Limited, de Cormac MccCarthy - por Sofia Freitas


As serious as a heart attack.  Black claims to be this at the beginning of the Sunset Limited. One could see a kind of morbid humor in such a statement, considering Black has just finished stopping another man from committing suicide when he says it. If Black wasn’t serious, things could lead back to White trying to kill himself again.
The lingering scent of divinity. A catch phrase Black hears from a preacher. Black claims he does not think of anything that does not have the lingering scent of divinity; an interesting point to note is that, throughout the story, Black’s arguments to dissuade White from his point of view all end up drawing from the same idea that it is through believing in God and in the light that White can see life with new purpose.
I read the Book of Job. White claims this when asked whether he has read the Bible or not. The irony of the statement is not lost on the reader, considering that the Book of Job deals with the theme of God’s punishment of the just and can be criticized in a way that would portray God as an incompetent entity or as one who does not care to save or help those who are faithful and just. This would end up showing the very action of reading the Bible, a book dedicated to God, and Black’s convictions towards believing in God as achieving happiness, as pointless and foolish ventures.
See when that next uptown express is due. The ‘uptown express’, as Black calls it, is the Sunset Limited: the train that crosses the country from Louisiana to California can be seen as a way for someone who comes from a poorer background (typically those living in Louisiana have less favorable living conditions than California; California is considered one of the states with the highest amount of billionaires living in it) to get to a ‘richer’ state. We can see the Sunset Limited as a metaphor or a perverse representation of White’s ‘ascension’ to a better reality. Black tries to show White ‘the light’ and tries to steer him towards what he believes is a better way of thinking by keeping him away from the ‘uptown express.’ White, on the other hand, finds the ‘uptown express’ to be his ticket to a better state of being.
Fixin’ to put you in the trickbag. The ‘trickbag’ is Black’s code for a group of experiences and information that he commits to memory and saves for future use. The trickbag seems to be what the characters refer to as their deposit for arguments and expressions that might later advance their rhetoric, and this ends up being called back to a few times during the narrative.
Moral leper colony. If taken literally, those who would suffer of moral leprosy would theoretically be those whose morals would slowly degrade into nothingness, individuals having a disease that can never truly be cured. White refers to the people living in Black’s neighborhood as a colony where the people are beyond saving.


Constituents. Black mentions constituents as something one can have in order to organize, or to live their life; the word is an interesting marker of Black’s own social background, as it happens to be used amongst prisoners and drug peddlers. White questions why he’d need constituents and Black claims he does not necessarily need them, but the opinion that one should live one’s life by feeling like they are a part of something (for instance, like Black believes he is part of God’s plan by doing his best as one of his faithful) in order to find happiness is something we can infer from the conversation. White does not feel like he is a part of anything, he does not feel like a ‘constituent’ in anything, not even where he teaches or among his family. There is a lack of belonging, and, while Black admits that he doesn’t necessarily need to belong to anything, there can is truth in stating that some people can in fact feel more fulfilled, feel like their lives have meaning, when they believe they are a part of something, be it a higher purpose or something more mundane.
Manual overrider. Black’s ‘manual override’ would make him revert to his violent ways. The manual override implies that Black would stop forcing himself to be a good man to others and to just let himself go and give way to despair. White finds the expression interesting perhaps because he sees the irony of Black applying the catch-phrase without truly giving it deeper consideration. If we take into account that he has, in fact, to force himself to care and to continue living, we can assume that life is too Black as much a bleak and painful experience as it is to White; by stopping himself from going into manual override, Black is simply struggling against what is inevitable in White’s eyes.
Communal misery. White’s concept of communal misery is exactly what it sounds like. It is the search of kinship through the common ground of being miserable. People group together in function of how miserable they feel, and White does not see how something like that could be in any way something anyone would wish to do. Socialization seems to be, for White, something people do to avoid introspection, to avoid thinking about their situations on their own. It is then a type of coping mechanism for those who still practice living. In a religious context, believing in God is just a different flavor of deluding oneself into believing that life is not devoid of happiness.

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