I don’t think it would be a stretch to call Cormac McCarthy one of our era’s greatest American writers. He has certainly carried the torch of a variety of writers that came before him, from Hemingway to O’Connor. McCarthy is known for his stripped down prose, and The Sunset Limited takes it even a step further.
If you have read The Road, Child of God, or any of his other books, then you know that McCarthy works as a mechanical minimalist. He uses only the sparsest punctuation and avoids dialogue tags whenever possible. His style is gritty, realistic, and grotesque in a wonderful Southern Gothic sense.
The Sunset Limited has the usual bleak McCarthy tone, but is written entirely in dramatic form. This is essentially a play script. However, its stage directions are more sparse than most plays. Really, the format seems to be McCarthy challenging himself. Whereas a lot of his novels force him to write so tight that there is no doubt who is speaking, regardless of notation, this seems to be an experiment in stripping a novel down to dialogue only.