McCarthy's All the pretty horses: themes and analysis

John Grady's Cole's Romanticism In All The Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses tells the story of John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old master horseman, as he leaves his home in West Texas and travels south into Mexico to seek adventure. The romantic attachments he forms there, in the form of a lovely ranch-owner's daughter, a younger enigmatic fellow traveler, and indeed the land itself and the very idea of the possibility of romance afford him nothing ultimately but heartache. But McCarthy suggests throughout the novel that it is this possibility of romance, this very idea of living life committed to something other than the everyday quality of petty existence, which keeps men like Cole going. In seeking to find something better, to realize some ideal that seems to drive them forward, that perhaps they alone see, they serve as models for the kind of life that is still available in the modern world.

In this paper, the story of John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses will be considered as a model of the romantic wanderer who seeks to find substance in life and excellence in himself and others, despite the humdrum quality of his surroundings or the danger of his quest. The basic outline of Cole's story and the deeper meaning of his quest will be weighed in order to determine what it says about the validity of romanticism. For it is in this notion of seeking attachment to, as the character Alfonsa says in the story, "what is true above what is useful" (240), that Cole shows himself to be a youth maturing into manhood, but a manhood that is worth having in his idealistic view.

The basic plot of All the Pretty Horses is simple. As the novel begins, Cole's grandfather has died and the family plans to sell the farm where he has always lived. Cole feels his way of life slipping away even before it has begun in earnest, so he and a friend decide to ride into Mexico and find work as cowboys. They meet another, younger boy named Blevins who seems to have the same idea and agree to let him ride along, even though this younger traveler has a story that doesn't sound right. Along the way, Blevins loses his horse and his gun and they ride into a nearby town where they find the horse and take it back. They are chased by a posse and separate. Cole and his friend ride further south and find work on a farm.

Cole's excellent skills as a horseman earn the attention of the rancher, and the rancher's daughter, Alejandra, wins Cole's affection. He falls in love with the daughter, only to find that the police are looking for him and his friend because, as it turns out, Blevins has killed a man and they are suspected as accomplices. The rancher learns of Cole's affection for Alejandra and turns Cole over to the police to stop the affair. Cole is sent to prison where he is targeted as an outsider. He gets in a fight with an assassin who almost kills him, only to be released suddenly as he is recovering the prison infirmary. He discovers that Alejandra has talked Alfonsa, her grandaunt, into purchasing his release from prison in exchange for a promise never to see him again. He rides to see Alfonsa, where he is treated to a long philosophical treatise about the nature of truth and the inevitability of bloodshed and violence. He goes to see Alejandra, but she rejects his plea to come away with him. He returns to the U.S. only to find his home and his friend, who has also returned home, seem like strangers. As the novel ends, he is riding west into the sunset, still seeking the elusive meaning in life that his dogged determination, now fired by experience yet not burned by tragedy, tells him is available.

While the story in All the Pretty Horses is simple, the deeper meaning of the story lies in between the lines of the action, often in the symbols that the author uses. This is clear on the very first page of the book. In the novel's opening line, McCarthy writes that "The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door" (1). In this line, McCarthy is describing how both the reality of life and the dream of an ideal become distorted for Cole as he passes through a moment between youth and manhood. Cole is preparing, when we meet him, to go to his grandfather's funeral, where he will see the man who has been largely responsible for raising him and the life he has always imagined to lay before him put to rest. He steps outside where he sees a train, a traditional symbol of romanticism and loneliness in western myth, rumbling through the early morning's darkness, its headlamps lighting up the fenceline, only to drag those images back into the darkness as it makes its way forward. Here McCarthy suggests that romanticism is bordered by modern life, but the boundaries don't become clear until we go in search of them. This story is about how Cole went in search of them.

Cole is a young man, and therefore is often too confident of himself even as he shows himself to be a seeker. For example, he goes to see a play put on by his mother, who is an actress, in the hopes that he will find something in art that reflects on life to give it meaning. But he doesn't find anything that interests him (21). This failure to see is meant to indicate a fullness of spirit, a surety that his dreams lay elsewhere than in cultured society, rather than an inability to understand art. There are hints here of the why of Cole's story, as the mother is portrayed as an absent figure who has never given him love and acceptance, a theme which figures into many of McCarthy's novels (Snyder, 77). But in any event, the fact of where those dreams lie specifically is suggested by a conversation with his father, as he is telling him goodbye in preparation to leave. The father, a man who also has a restless spirit, says that he feels like the Comanches must have, unsure of what's coming but knowing it's out there (26). His father tells him that he had at one point gone out to California to try to make a living, but that he hadn't lasted long (25). Cole feels the same restlessness and the same longing for a wilder life in a more savage society, but he doesn't share his father's doubts and fears. As he is lying under the stars that night trying to convince his friend to come with him to Mexico his friend wavers and tries to talk him out of it. "I'm already gone," said Cole (27). In his mind, the quest he was on was inevitable.

Woodson argues that Cole's story is an example of what Foucault calls "the will to truth." She writes "This inclination to seek in discourse an a priori truth masks the fact that nature merely reflects desire…" (149). Throughout the story, this juxtaposition between truth and desire is evident. In one important scene, Cole is invited to Alfonsa's house, where she tells him that she is aware that he is seeing Alejandra and that she wants him to stop. She tells him that in Mexico a woman's honor cannot be regained if sexual indiscretions take place, and that this truth must be respected and that she will see that it is so. There is a moment of uncomfortable silence, as Cole is considering the truth of what she says in the face of his desire for the young woman. He answers, "You didn't have to invite me over just to tell me that" (137), and the woman thinks she has made her point. In reality, Cole has merely told her that he will seek his own truth, and that she needn't have wasted her breath. Later, he meets the girl under the cover of darkness and they make love. His actions suggest that he is willing to follow a romantic notion even when it flies in the face of considered reason, even if it implies danger or loss to himself and others.

Cole is a seeker, and a young man with a young man's confidence. As such, he often reacts to events around him with a kind of braggadocio that is at once indicative of an admirable spiritedness and a reckless disregard. In the prison, for example, as he is being interviewed by a man who has the ability to take his life if he doesn't answer correctly, he is respectfully defiant, telling the man that he isn't afraid to die (194). This answer eventually caused him to almost lose his life. In a similar moment, when he and his friend become separated from Blevins, his friend tries to talk him out of going back for the boy, arguing that it can only lead to trouble. Cole simply can't bring himself to do it (79). It seems that he is driven by a notion of himself as a kind of manly hero, a notion that often gets him into trouble. Luce argues that this is a sign of Cole acting as romantic hero, pointing out that "The novel is suffused with evidence of his immaturity, his romanticism, his grandiosity, his disappointed sense of entitlement" (155).

When he meets with Alfonsa near the end of the novel, she approaches him with a weary worldliness, seeing in him the kind of youthful idealism that she had at one point believed in. She tells him a story of how she had once come to meet two young revolutionaries who later overthrew the government, only to be executed themselves in the next wave of political violence: