Who Wins?

Many elements of games can be found in The Sunset Limited. 

Their names. Black and White. They sound like they should be playing chess, Go, or some other classic board game. It also seems fitting that they should be seated at a table for most of the story.

The dozens. Black talks about "the dozens," a game where players insult each other. To take an insult personally is to lose the game.

Commentary on the game. Both make statements about what they're doing, betraying a mutual awareness that, at some level, each is trying to pull something over on the other. Either that, or each is just humoring the other, which, in the end, would actually be another way of trying to pull something over on the other. Some of their commentary:
"I've got to strategize,"
"the trick bag,"
"You got me on unfamiliar ground,"
"You tough, Professor. You tough."

Their coyness. It's as if they're playing cards sometimes. Neither wants to tip his hand. Black doesn't want to reveal too much about his prison life. When Black brings up Christianity at one point, White asks, "How do you know I'm not Jewish?" When Black brings up White's father, White asks "Who said he was dead?"

What they do say about themselves. On the other hand, while some of what they say seems to be said in order to keep from being pinned down, from being known by the other, some of what they say is the opposite. Some of what they say is about presenting images of themselves to each other, about making themselves known in a certain way. Black calls himself---somewhat facetiously, I think---"just a dumb, country nigger." White calls himself "different" than other people. Black and White play roles, in other words. They represent versions of themselves, which is what game play is often about.

For all the ways in which The Sunset Limited looks like a game, it's kind of hard to tell how to interpret the basic narrative of that game. If it's a game, then who wins? There seems to be many different interpretations, and there doesn't seem to be one that is decidedly better than the others.

White Wins, Black Loses. White puts up with Black for a long time, but can't do it forever. When he gets impassioned toward the end, he manages to shut down Black, who is reduced to a desperate plea out to God.

Black Wins, White Forfeits. Black kind of mentioned this when he talked about the dozens. To leave the game area is to in effect resign. Neither Black nor White had been beaten when White left. There was more game play to be had, but White cut it short.

Neither Party Wins; The Game Ends. The goal of the game is only to keep playing it. In that sense neither Black nor White win. I thought of this interpretation when researching Gadamer for my third essay, who gives this interpretation of game play in general.

Time in the Sunset Limited

Time as Cycle

William Quirk argues "The Sunset Limited reveals that it operates in terms of a cyclical conception of time, not the conventional understanding of linear time, the 'clock time' that is an infinite succession of new moments (13)." Quirk imagines there are multiple versions of Black and White's conversation apart from the one version we read, each version following the previous one in time, as in a cycle, echoing moments from the past.

Erratic Time

White's level of interest in the conversation varies. At times he is almost ready to walk out the door and, at other times, he seems to get lost in conversation, forgetting himself and his hang ups. Time varies as one's interest level rises and falls. So time's rate, at least for the characters in The Sunset Limited, and probably for the audience too, is not constant. It accelerates and decelerates. 

I wanted to see if there was some concept of a specifically theatrical time, kind of in the way that I've heard people talk about narrative time as opposed to real time. There is the time it takes for the events to be described, and this is often (almost always) different than the time it takes for these events to be communicated through narrative. In terms of theatrical time,  I found this article. 

From the article, I got the impression playwrights have experimented with the presentation of time in a lot of different ways. There are "miracle plays," which cover the whole history of the universe. This is in contrast to "the handling of time in Japanese Noh theatre, in which real time, with its inevitable passage is retarded to create a sensation of timelessness."