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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