FREE ESSAY ON ALL THE PRETTY HORSES

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES

John Grady Cole, the last in a long line of west Texas ranchers, is, at sixteen, poised on
the sorrowful, painful edge of manhood. When he realizes the only life he has ever known
is disappearing into the past and that cowboys are as doomed as the Comanche who came
before them, he leaves on a dangerous and harrowing journey into the beautiful and
utterly foreign world that is Mexico. In the guise of a classic Western, All the Pretty
Horses is at its heart a lyrical and elegiac coming-of-age story about love, friendship,
and loyalty that will leave John Grady, and the reader, changed forever. When his mother
decides to sell the cattle ranch he has grown up working, John Grady Cole and his friend
Lacey Rawlins set out on horseback for Mexico, a land free of the fences and highways
that have begun to invade west Texas, a land where the boys are not able to read the look
in a man's eye. As they approach the Rio Grande, they are joined by the youthful and
mysterious Jimmy Blevins, whose fine horse, hot-blooded temper, and talent with a pistol
are as certain an omen of trouble as the desolate and forbidding landscape stretching out
before them. In a violent and freakish thunderstorm, Blevins loses all his worldly
possessions; and the foolhardy attempt to recover them soon brands the boys as horse
thieves. On the run, they split up, with John Grady and Rawlins finding refuge on a
hacienda where few questions are asked and a talent for breaking horses is still a source
of honor, and where they fall into a routine as familiar to them as the shape of their
saddles. At night, John Grady rides the patron's prized sire through the mountains beyond
the hacienda in the company of Alejandra, the patron's beautiful daughter. But in a land
as bound by honor and reputation as this is, the white-hot love between John Grady and
this girl is as dangerous as anything they will face. When soldiers arrive to take John
Grady and Rawlins away, the boys know it has nothing to do with Jimmy Blevins, but is
instead because of some deeper, more elusive transgression that John Grady has committed
in the name of love. With no one to plead their case, their fate is dire indeed. John
Grady and Rawlins find themselves in a Mexican prison governed by stark violence. But in
the hands of Cormac McCarthy this place takes on a dreamlike quality; it is not right or
wrong, good or evil, but merely as inevitable a part of life as the sun setting in the
West, something that must be faced in order for one to survive. All the Pretty Horses is
the first volume in the Border Trilogy (the second volume is entitled The Crossing; and
the third, The Cities of the Plain), and this name implies that the text is as much about
the arid and desolate landscapes and blood-red skies of the great Southwest as it is
about the people who inhabit the region. Together the land and sky form a lyrical
tapestry that colors and alters the narrative in subtle and unexpected ways. John Grady's
journey leaves him wiser but saddened, yet out of this heartbreak comes the resilience of
a man who has claimed his place in the world. There is no record of John Grady passing
through customs on his return to the United States, but we realize he has much to
declare. Written with the lyricism that has made McCarthy one of the great American prose
stylists, All the Pretty Horses is at once a bittersweet and profoundly moving tale of
love, loss, and redemption and a stunning portrait of Mexico. of fate and the weight of
manhood.