The publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 vaulted Cormac McCarthy into the spotlight of the American literary mainstream. Though his five previous novels had garnered consistently positive reviews and a number of awards, McCarthy had endured poor sales and toiled in relative obscurity. However, Random House’s ardent promotion and the book’s romantic western qualities helped make All the Pretty Horses a national best-seller.

Director Mike Nichols optioned the movie rights (Billy Bob Thornton would eventually direct the disappointing film version), and the novel won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Such success had a snowball effect on McCarthy’s career. Vintage re-released his previous works in new paperback editions, and The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), the subsequent installments of the Border Trilogy, also became best-sellers. Meanwhile, McCarthy’s career received increasing scholarly scrutiny.

Because it subverts the genre’s investment in heroic individualism, critics have labeled the novel a postmodern western. While helpful, this designation obscures the work’s conventional plotting and characterization. All the Pretty Horses tells the story of 16-year-old John Grady Cole’s journey from southwest Texas into Mexico and back. Along the way he performs deeds of high valor as he struggles to live out his romantic cowboy code.

The story opens in 1949 in San Angelo, Texas, with the funeral of John Grady’s maternal grandfather, the tutelary spirit on whose ranch John Grady has been raised. The grandfather’s passing and John Grady’s desire to keep the unprofitable ranch against his mother’s wishes marks the hero as a belated figure. Like the culture of the Comanches who once roamed this land, the cowboy way of life will soon be lost to history as the postwar boom in the Texas oil industry displaces ranching as southwest Texas’s economic engine. Unable to sustain his dream of the Old West, John Grady sets off on horseback for a larky ride into Mexico with his more pragmatic friend, Lacey Rawlins, who plays Sancho Panza to the novel’s quixotic hero.

Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy’s writing, varied and intoxicating, seduces the reader to buy into John Grady’s western fantasy. His prose shifts effortlessly from direct accounts of the journey to terse, comic dialogue, then careens into exhilarating descriptions of the landscape that locate the boys in an almost mythological relation to the universe. In contrast to the “picture book” horses John Grady admires but has been told do not exist, in the early sections of All the Pretty Horses the storybook cowboy life indeed appears attainable. The boys imagine themselves as desperadoes on the run, legends in the making, and the book’s seamless integration of western male bravado with Faulknerian rhetorical flourishes tempts us to see them so as well. McCarthy’s language, however, undercuts this response by quietly intimating that this is all playacting, and when the boys are joined by a 13-year-old runaway on a magnificent horse they presume he’s stolen, they begin to lose control over the fantasy narrative they so confidently act out.

Critics have suggested that Jimmy Blevins, as their new comrade calls himself, is one of a number of characters who represents the Evil that John Grady’s Adamic American innocence fails to heed. Despite Rawlins’s warnings, John Grady remains foolishly tolerant of Blevins, who loses not only his horse but also his clothes in a thunderstorm. Soon after, in one of the book’s most comically adventurous moments, in the town of Encantada while dressed only in undershorts, Blevins boldly steals the horse back.

John Grady and Rawlins separate from Blevins and journey to the Hacienda de Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, where they are hired on as ranch hands. Here John Grady becomes embroiled in a torrid affair with Alejandra, the beautiful daughter of the hacendado, Don Hector. Seeing Alejandra riding, John Grady thinks, “real horse, real land and sky and yet a dream withal,” and for a brief moment the ideal of romantic love coincides with his idyllic vision of ranch life.

The novel’s revisionary inclinations emerge most clearly in the second half. Here the journey is reversed and the dream of retreat from the modern world shattered. First, the familial codes of Mexican aristocracy make Alejandra’s affair unacceptable to her father. Having gotten wind of the events that transpired in Encantada, as well as the fact that Blevins later killed three men in yet another effort to regain his horse, Don Hector relinquishes the boys to the Mexican authorities.

Having been handed over to the Encantada police, the boys are forced to stand helplessly by as the town’s ruthless police captain executes Blevins. From there they are sent to a prison in Saltillo, where their stubborn refusal to bribe their way out nearly costs them their lives. John Grady and Rawlins manage to survive only because Dueña Alfonsa, Alejandra’s great aunt, has bought their release in exchange for Alejandra’s promise to end the relationship to John Grady.

While Rawlins returns to Texas, John Grady pursues Alejandra. However, Dueña Alfonsa explains the arrangement she has made with Alejandra and justifies her interference by telling of her own similarly ill-fated romance. The rigorously realistic outlook she has gained from such experience compels her to protect Alejandra from dreamers like John Grady, the kind of men “to whom things happen.”

Thwarted in his pursuit of Alejandra, on his return home through Encantada John Grady decides to reclaim his horse, and in a spectacular single-handed raid, he retrieves Blevins’s horse as well, takes the police captain hostage, and suffers a bullet wound to the leg, which he later cauterizes with the scalded barrel of his gun.

While John Grady’s experience strips him of his western American naïveté, his exploits, as well as the novel’s concluding scenes, remain perplexing. His “grace under pressure” verges on the superheroic and seems almost parodic at times. Nevertheless, Dianne Luce, like others, construes John Grady’s final actions as a more mature form of heroism, arguing that he forgoes a quest for dominance (of nature, women, and others) in favor of a quest for truth. Indeed, upon returning to San Angelo after having failed in his noble mission to return Blevins’s horse to its rightful owner, John Grady appears at novel’s end shorn of his romantic illusions yet relatively uncorrupted.

Still, because the novel concludes with an ambiguous image of the hero vanishing into the landscape, a mere shadow in the blood-red sunset in the west, it remains unclear whether his journey has led to a new understanding of the world or has simply rendered his alienation complete.

Sources

Alarcon, Daniel Cooper. “All the Pretty Mexicos: Cormac McCarthy’s Mexican Representations.” In Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, edited by James D. Lilley, 141–152. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.
Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1997.
Lilley, James D. “ ‘The Hands of Yet Other Puppets’: Figuring Freedom and Reading Repetition in All the Pretty Horses.” In Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Rick Wallach, 272–287. New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Luce, Dianne C. “ ‘When You Wake’: John Grady Cole’s Heroism in All the Pretty Horses.” In Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, 57–70. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995.
McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Random House, 1992.
Morrison, Gail Moore. “All the Pretty Horses: John Grady Cole’s Expulsion from Paradise.” In Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, rev. ed., edited by Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, 175–194. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.
Owens, Barcley. Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000.
Wallach, Rick. “Theater, Ritual, and Dream in the Border Trilogy.” Southwestern American Literature 1 (Fall 2001): 159–177.

Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis

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