John Grady Cole's Romanticism in All the Pretty Horses

Introduction: Cole's Romantic Quest

Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses tells the story of John Grady Cole, a sixteen-year-old master horseman who 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 — afford him nothing ultimately but heartache. Yet McCarthy suggests throughout the novel that it is this very possibility of romance, this idea of living life committed to something other than the petty quality of everyday existence, that keeps men like Cole going. In seeking to find something better, to realize some ideal that seems to drive them forward and that perhaps they alone can see, they serve as models for the kind of life that is still available in the modern world.

This paper considers the story of John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses 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 they say about the validity of romanticism. 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 — a manhood that, in his idealistic view, is worth having.

Plot Overview and the Structure of the Journey

The basic plot of All the Pretty Horses is straightforward. 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 properly begun, so he and a friend decide to ride into Mexico and find work as cowboys. They meet a younger boy named Blevins who seems to share the same idea and agree to let him ride along, even though his story doesn't quite add up. Along the way, Blevins loses his horse and his gun, and they ride into a nearby town where they recover the horse and take it back. Chased by a posse, the three separate, and Cole and his friend ride further south, eventually finding work on a ranch.

Cole's exceptional 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 her, only to discover that the police are looking for him and his friend because Blevins has killed a man and they are suspected as accomplices. The rancher learns of Cole's feelings 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 into a fight with an assassin who nearly kills him, before being released suddenly while he is recovering in the prison infirmary. He discovers that Alejandra persuaded her grandaunt, Alfonsa, to purchase his release in exchange for a promise never to see him again.

Cole rides to see Alfonsa, who offers him a long philosophical treatise on the nature of truth and the inevitability of bloodshed and violence. He then goes to see Alejandra, but she rejects his plea to come away with him. He returns to the United States, only to find that both his home and his friend — who has also returned — seem like strangers. As the novel ends, Cole is riding west into the sunset, still seeking the elusive meaning in life that his dogged determination, now fired by experience yet not extinguished by tragedy, tells him is available.

Symbolism, Truth, and the Opening of the Novel

While the story in All the Pretty Horses is simple, its deeper meaning lies between the lines of the action, often embedded in the symbols McCarthy employs. This is clear on the very first page. 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). Here McCarthy describes 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 first meet him, to go to his grandfather's funeral — to see the man who largely raised him, and the life he had always imagined before him, put to rest.

He steps outside and sees a train, a traditional symbol of romanticism and loneliness in western myth, rumbling through the early-morning darkness, its headlamps lighting up the fence line before dragging those images back into shadow as it moves forward. McCarthy suggests that romanticism is bordered by modern life, but that those boundaries do not become clear until we go in search of them. Cole's entire story is about that search.

Conclusion: The Enduring Spirit of the Romantic Hero

Ultimately, Cole's journey did not end when Alejandra left him. He encountered continuing violence as he gathered his things and left Mexico, and continuing disappointment when he returned to the United States. Nevertheless, he became justified in his search — in his own mind — sometime around those events. As he crosses back into the United States, he meets a judge who questions him about his time in Mexico and tells him he "done real well" to get back safely and sanely (291). Cole seems to believe that it is not in the arriving but in the journeying that he has done well. As the novel ends, he sets off again.

Arnold suggests that the novel is an example of a "dark twinship" reflecting on passages from earlier works in which characters were attempting to rein in chaos and violence, while Cole was seeking it out (18). While there is merit in this interpretation, Cole's story reads more fundamentally as a quest for romantic connection to a set of values and a way of life that no longer seem viable. Cole, as a desperate hero in search of that connection, proves by both rule and exception that the West is no longer with us — though its spirit and values remain.

References

Arnold, Edwin. "The Mosaic of McCarthy's Fiction." In Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Wade Hall and Rick Wallach. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995.

Luce, Dianne. "'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. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995.

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Snyder, Phillip. "Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy's The Road." The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (Spring 2008): 69–86.

Woodson, Linda Townley. "Deceiving the Will to Truth: The Semiotic Foundation of All the Pretty Horses." In Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Wade Hall and Rick Wallach. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995.