Before he leaves San Angelo, John Grady seems unsure of himself and in a state of perpetual blankness - like most teenagers - but he also is unusually possessed by a search for meaning, for fulfillment. A brief comment on language and culture in All the Pretty Horses. Billy finds a kind old doctor who saves Boyd's life, but Boyd insists on Billy going to find the young girl who had accompanied them on part of their journey in Mexico. The aunt recounts her own story of love and loss, and says, though it might seem she would be sympathetic to her own grandniece's desire, it, in fact, has the opposite impact; she opposes their involvement. The opening of the novel shows John Grady Cole, a sixteen-year-old Texan who wants badly to be a cowboy, at the funeral of his grandfather.
His father tells him that the two his parents had in common a great love of horses, and they were mistaken in thinking that was enough. What are the roles of women in this novel? This is a story of courage, loyalty, and friendship; of loving, living, and of dying. In what ways, if any, does it transcend the Western genre? Rawlins and John Grady travel farther south. Cole and Rawlins' thrill-seeking adventures with Blevins and the stolen horse catch up to them, however, and they are held prisoners in a brutal penitentiary, where their cowboy instincts are put to the ultimate test. For example, when John Grady Cole finds Redbo in a stable after his long incarceration and travels on the grullo, Redbo whinnies, or calls to him in a touching reunion. Everything he losses is so important to him and he tries to burry these emotions. Indeed, it is fair to say that All the Pretty Horses is about the internalization of a myth that has always been writ in starkly physical, larger than life terms.
Most moving and tragic among John Grady's heroic traits is his refusal to bow to fate, his insistence on personal responsibility. Not that there were, necessarily, happy endings during earlier historic times, but our notions of romance make us believe there were. Cormac McCarthy's novel All the Pretty Horses concerns itself with the meeting place between realism and romanticism. It is difficult to ascertain what Cormac McCarthy thinks of his most famous work since he refuses to discuss it in addition to all his other novels. The first scene of the novel shows the two men, with a third cowboy, drinking at a bar in Juarez across the border from El Paso. The story begins in 1949, soon after the death of John Grady's grandfather when Grady learns the ranch is to be sold.
Faced with the prospect of moving into town, Grady instead chooses to leave and persuades his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, to accompany him. Shortly before they cross the Mexican border, they encounter a young man who says he is named Jimmy Blevins and who seems to be about 13 but claims to be older. Horses do carry with them the images of romance, of time long past. Although readers may not know the direct translation of the Spanish, much of it is clear from the context of the surrounding English text. The country is a place where John loses himself: he becomes tougher, but ultimately cannot reenter society because he has become estranged from it. In fact, it appears that these are only two bumps in the rode for John Grady Cole. All the griping aside, the score, composed and performed by country music renaissance man -- and his collaborating band members and -- is something else completely.
All the Pretty Horses contains scenes of depraved cruelty, vicious cynicism, and bloody violence. Orchestrations ride ambiently in the background, highlighting tension and drama. Before 1992, had not sold more than 5,000 copies of any one of his books. There are many themes in All the Pretty Horses, however I believe lose was definitely most prevalent. While they are being transferred from their small jail to a larger prison, the captain and police officers detour to a remote ranch.
In another place, guitars, both strummed and soloed upon, create an impressionistic picture of a campfire jam session. But it is the events of the entire book that fill in his character, and, even then, we must wait for the third book of the trilogy to get the complete picture of who John Grady is. Parham begins this difficult task at the end of the 1930s and is away for some time. The Western genre of film and literature has been important and popular in American culture, from High Noon in 1952 to Dances with Wolves in 1990, from the novels of Owen Wister to those of Louis L'Amour. All the Pretty Horses is the story of this cowboy code of honor--the foundation of the Western lifestyle--put to the test.
These are stories of cowboys and horses and adventure in the dusty Southwest but are so much more, magnificent tales of existence and musing on human purpose and destiny. It has been the self-appointed role of contemporary scholarship and culture to reach past the popular vision of America's westward expansion and settlement--a vision shaped and colored by hundreds of Western movies and their depictions of death without blood, and solitary heroic cowboys vanquishing ultimately cowardly villains--in an attempt to recover the true history of the American West, to remove the romantic and heroic veneer from a past of violence and prejudice, of dreams shattered as much as hopes fulfilled. Billy digs up his brother's body and brings his remains home. You might have ended up finding more than you bargained for. Its landscapes, sunsets, horses, and mountains, so iconic of the West, are symbols and reflections; through them the novel concerns itself with the human soul.
If we can survive the horse gallop, we can do anything. Cormac McCarthy has strict rules about rendering conversation: he does not use quotation marks, and he does not relate Spanish-language conversations in English. The pretty horses are legend, myth, romance, nature, and spirituality; and John Grady, on his quest, supposedly to find a ranch, or home, throws himself into all of that. It is on that basis that it is possibly the penultimate American work of art of its era. It is supposed to be true that those who o not know history are condemned to repeat it.
Speaking in the first person, the author. After embarking on this journey, John Grady and Rawlins are no longer children. Innocent in their youth, both Rawlins and John Grady never question their assumption that members of two communities can merge harmoniously. But he also is larger than life, mythic at sixteen. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. He knows the horse is lame because it twitches one ear when it steps on that hoof. She tells John Grady about the consequences in Mexican society of a woman losing her honor, and how Alejandra can ill-afford to be seen in the presence of John Grady due to its potential impact on her reputation.