(1992) All the Pretty Horses

There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change.

Plot Summary

All the Pretty Horses begins with the tragic death of sixteen year old John Grady Cole’s grandfather, which displaces him from the Texas cattle ranch he had hoped to someday run. With nowhere else to go, Grady decides to seek his fortune across the border to Mexico on horseback alongside his friend Lacy Rawlins. During the first part of their journey, the two boys run into Blevins, an unpredictable yet charming young outlaw with a beautiful horse who continuously puts their lives in danger until an incident with the Mexican law causes their temporary separation. Grady and Rawlins, now outlaws, continue their journey south and come upon paradise in the form of a hacienda run by a rich man named Don Héctor and indirectly by his aunt Alfonsa. Grady impresses them both with his knowledge and talent with horses while falling head over heels for Don Héctor’s alluring and free-spirited daughter Alejandra. Over the course of a few months, Grady and Alejandra have a passionate but secret affair. As soon as Don Héctor finds out, he has Grady and Rawlins arrested for their previous crimes and sent to prison. On the way, they encounter Blevins once more, though he is tragically executed by a corrupt police captain. Grady and Rawlins are sent to a Mexican prison where they struggle to survive. Only with Alejandra’s promise to never be with Grady again is Alfonsa able to use her influence to release them from prison. After their release, Rawlins returns to Texas and Grady meets with Alejandra one last time before her ultimate rejection of him. On his way back to Texas, Grady delivers justice to the corrupted police captain who killed him in Blevins’ name. He returns to Texas and unsuccessfully searches for the owner of Blevins’ horse before going home, only to face the death of his grandmother figure and an uncertain future.

Critical Analysis

With All the Pretty Horses (ATPH) Cormac McCarthy moves away from his former obscurity and the explicit violence and depravity found in his previous novels to a more accessible narrative. ATPH is a new kind of book, a book no longer full of mythically detailed descriptions of place and time but instead relying on the sensual and popular imagination to fill the gaps. It is a simple but profound reading experience where the reader is left with a deep sense of “nostalgic beauty and tragic loss” that comes from McCarthy’s own version of a western romance and a mythical coming of age journey into Mexico--idealizing altruism, friendship and heartbreaking love (Owens 64). ATPH is the first in the Border Trilogy series, but the novel includes themes and similar characters from previous novels while setting the stage for characters and different kinds of relationships in future novels. 

In ATPH McCarthy creates deeper relationships between characters for the first time, a theme he will continue through his recent novel, The Road. The relationship between Grady and his father begins to resemble that of the man and his son fromThe Road, a relationship which also can be compared to the unsaid love between Grady and Rawlins founded on respect, admiration and unquestionable loyalty. Furthermore, in both The Road and ATPH, dialogue becomes an important experiential element inciting vocal rather than mental self reflection. Throughout ATPH Rawlins initiates deep conversations with Grady, such as the one they have after they are released from the Mexican prison:

Rawlins was quiet for a long time. Then he said: What’s the worst thing you ever done?
I dont know. I guess if I done anything real bad I’d rather not tell it. Why?
I dont know. I was in the hospital cut I got to thinkin: I wouldnt be here if I wasnt supposed to be here. You ever think like that?
Yeah. Sometimes. (214)

Thus, ATPH’s dialogue replaces the indirect discourse and stream of consciousness technique used in Suttree as the way into the characters’ thoughts.

While the form and narrative techniques in ATPH look forward to his more recent novels, characters and themes also look back toBlood Meridian.  Edwin T. Arnold in “The Mosaic of McCarthy’s Fiction” writes, “these books speak one to another whatever their setting [. . .]The question is whether ATPH is a parallel or a continuation, a reflection or an alternative, or as Arnold argues, the same story from different perspectives (18). McCarthy’s language suggests parallels between John Grady and the kid. He describes the kid as “pledged in blood” and Grady as “redeemable in blood” (19). In Blood Meridian, McCarthy plays with the idea of social conditioning, stripping the kid away from any love or family ties in order to rationalize his mindless violence. In contrast, Grady was lovingly raised by his grandfather and a Mexican grandmother figure, and his circumstantial and necessary survivalist use of violence becomes an object of moral concern, as shown when he tells the judge in the end: “I don’t feel justified” (McCarthy 290). However, both characters are portrayed as inherently good rather than a product of a particular era’s social conditioning, which suggests that Grady and the kid are the same character in different time periods. As Alfonsa explains to Grady, “If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change.” (235) Yet, Grady is the one that cannot come to terms with his goodness coexisting side by side with the evil in the rest of the world. As Diane Luce describes, “John Grady’s journey, like those of so many of McCarthy’s protagonists, is an initiation into evil”, as he experiences a “growth in realism and humility and the concurrent lost of certainty” (162). This situation is different from the kid who grew up in a violent, unloving world from the beginning. Once Grady is shocked and disillusioned with the reality of the world in which he lives, he is able to take violent action in his life, illustrated by his revenge against the Mexican law official who kills Blevins.

Yet despite all the connections with the kid, John Grady is a complex character in his own right. Grady may be McCarthy’s first truly admirable character. In some ways, Grady is the perfect hero – young yet morally responsible, a cowboy and horse whisperer, and a good chess player. No longer a wanderer like previous protagonists, he becomes a type of character “with a need for roots” who wishes to fit into society and commit to its “firm morals and values” (Evenson 47). His altruism is unmatchable and often times irrational, especially when he chooses to keep helping Blevins even though he obviously is only going to get Grady and Rawlins into trouble. John Grady in his essence has internalized the typical Western romance as he leaves behind all his worldly possessions and sets off on a rite of passage adventure full of friendship, romance and loss. That ATPH is a romanticized western story is a common consensus between all critics. But far from being a cliché, the novel self consciously recognizes and critiques its own romanticism. Grady is the romantic figure caught up in a dream world where everything is possible, including “A beautiful woman, a ranch to run, a world arranged to match one’s ideas of right and justice.” (Luce 156) The title, from a traditional nursery rhyme, matches the promises engrained in the western story and myth. Yet Grady’s dreams are shattered after he and Rawlins are arrested and sent to prison. His beautiful woman, perfect ranch and dream world disappear, and he must come face to face with reality in all its uncertainty. However, as Luce argues, this is what makes Grady a true hero: He “is the romantic dreamer who gradually awakens to reality, which always lies waiting to test him, and who responds by abandoning his quest for dominance and courageously embracing instead a quest for truth and understanding.” (Luce 155-156)

The criticism of his character, however, comes not from questioning his authenticity, but his engrained sense of American entitlement. Grady excels and impresses both Don Héctor and Alfonsa in the hacienda life like a metaphor for a “myth of American progress, a conservative, ethnocentric myth based on Anglo-American superiority and entitlement.” (Owens 64-65) Though portrayed with innocence and goodwill, Grady reflects a constant “unacknowledged opportunism” (Luce 160), where he believes in the possibility of someday taking over the hacienda, making his relationship with Alejandra no longer a testament to pure and untainted love but an investment in his future. Alejandra becomes a symbol of entitlement as well, as “her whiteness matches a white heroine to a white hero” (Owens 65). The question remains whether the criticism of Grady’s sense of American entitlement extends to McCarthy’s own worldview, though the text clearly mocks such attitudes. Blevins declares “Cause I’m an American” (McCarthy 45) when asked why he should be able to join Grady and Rawlins on their journey, and Diane Luce argues that Blevins’ assertion represents “an ominous echo of ethnocentrism and racism” (Luce 160). Though a sense of ‘otherness’ is constant between Americans and Mexicans alike, Blevins statement arguably should be taken ironically. McCarthy attempts to show the beauty and danger of Mexico and goes so far as to write much of the dialogue in Spanish, proving that with a grasp of the language he and readers can begin to have an understanding of the culture surrounding the context of ATPH.

ATPH, therefore, does not completely portray the myth of western progression and civilization; instead it regresses southward towards a simpler and more nostalgic way of life. The inclusion of the typical Mexican romance story adds an element of class struggle: to that of a love story between a rich but kind hearted hacienda owner and the poor but attractive worker. Yet, unlike John Grady, McCarthy never overly idealizes Mexico as paradise. Instead he treats it from an “infernal paradise” perspective, describing the country through standard oppositional terms such as ‘enchanting’ and ‘repellent’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘desolate’, ‘civilized’ and ‘cruel’ (Cooper Alarcón 145). McCarthy gives Mexico a dimension that parallels that of the history of the US as represented in his other books, most notably Blood Meridian. For John Grady, “Mexico is attractive because it is a tabula rasa, a blank space on the map that has no past or history” (Cooper Alarcón 148). Yet over the course of his journey he must come to terms with Mexico’s violent and bloody past, where senseless killing and a bloody history is as much a part of the landscape as its beauty. For Grady, Mexico is as McCarthy critic Barcley Owens describes, “an Eden conceived and lost.” (Owens 90)

McCarthy contrasts Grady’s romantic view of Mexico with Alfonsa, Alejandra’s aunt’s, account of its bloody and violent history. The strong opposition between Alfonsa and Grady happens because, as Linda Townley Woodson describes in “Deceiving the Will to Truth: The Semiotic Foundation of All the Pretty Horses”, John Grady at first lives in a world where “truth is what one makes it” (152). The forces outside an individual’s control become a constant contrast between free will and fate (Busby 233), as Grady begins to discover throughout the novel. During her last speech to Grady, Alfonsa shows two ways of understanding fate. The first explains that “the responsibility of a decision could never be abandoned to a blind agency but could only be relegated to human decisions more and more remote from their consequences” (McCarthy 230). Alfonsa relates this through the parable of a coiner who creates a coin from a bullet, and whatever ensues becomes a ripple effect of events that trace back to the coiner’s decision, the origin of everything. The second metaphor for fate is a puppet show, where humanity’s fate lies in the hands of puppeteers who in turn are puppets controlled by higher puppeteers, and so on, so that the origin of events is unknown. Yet Alfonsa does not subscribe to either of these views completely. She tells Grady, “What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God – who knows all that can be known – seems powerless to change.” (McCarthy 239) A powerless God implies that fate is determined by men and men alone. War, as exemplified in ATPH with the Mexican Revolution, is the mindless violence of men attempting to control their own fate, as it is only through violence that man can attempt to reclaim his own fate from other men.

As themes of God, war, violence, fate and the nature of good and evil are explored throughout ATPH one thing is certain – the truth is hard to discern. McCarthy’s dialectical themes invite dialogue and exploration so that readers come to their own conclusions about their understandings of reality and McCarthy’s own worldview (Busby 227). Through the beauty of the novel and the context of a romantic western story one can look deeply to find the truths and possibilities of life. Even though Grady discovers in the end: “it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all” (McCarthy 284), he still finds courage to never abandon himself or the others around him and stand up for his ideals when all else fails. Despite the mindless violence of humankind constant throughout history, McCarthy’s novel suggests that deep relationships and a strong moral sense prevail.

by Andrea Gottschalk