Cormac McCarthy’s Platonic Dialogues: The Problem of Suicide in The Sunset Limited and Stella Maris

Cormac McCarthy’s dark, violent works have received attention from English scholars throughout his writing career but also bear reading by political theorists and philosophers as serious political literature. Two of McCarthy’s works, The Sunset Limited and Stella Maris, particularly ought to be read as and alongside Platonic dialogues. In the form and content of the dialogues, in both the argument and the action of the works, McCarthy engages with Platonic themes of life, death, the afterlife, and, most importantly for this analysis, suicide. In these dialogues, the characters of White and Alicia, as anti-Socratic figures, present rational arguments about the meaninglessness of the world against the religious arguments of their pseudo-Socratic counterparts, leading readers to question both the value of philosophical inquiry and what might keep someone from pursuing suicide, a perennial political problem.