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'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.

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-12-17, 15:03 authored by Mary BrewerMary Brewer
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.

History

School

  • The Arts, English and Drama

Department

  • English and Drama

Published in

The Cormac McCarthy Journal

Volume

12

Issue

1

Citation

BREWER, M.F., 2014. '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. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 12 (1), pp. 39-54.

Publisher

© Pennsylvania State University Press

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This is the accepted version of an article subsequently published in the Cormac McCarthy Journal. The definitive version is available here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.12.39

Language

  • en

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