preview

All The Pretty Horses Research Paper

Better Essays
Open Document

Guns and Cowboys: The end of an era Many recognize the classic image of the cowboy in an old western movie: the fearless, stoic hero that stays calm in moments of crisis. In Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, readers witness the protagonist, John Grady Cole, attempt to revive this famous archetype. Beginning as early as when the first pilgrims came to the new continent, Americans have always had a desire to “settle” Native American lands. In the time that followed, the West became a sort of proving ground for the Europeans and their decedents. During the nineteenth century, the image of land being settled by men on horses, who literally took the law into their own hands through their shotguns, became pervasive in the American mind. By …show more content…

In response, his estranged mother choses to sell the Grady family ranch and move away, leaving Cole with few options. Describing Cole’s sentiment towards his predicament, McCormack writes, “He turned south along the old war trail and he rode out to the crest of a low rise and dismounted and dropped the reins and walked out and stood like a man come to the end of something” (McCarthy 5). Cole and his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, resolve to ride to central Mexico, where cattle ranches are rumored to still thrive. As they ride through the changing landscape, only stopping to let their horses rest and camp, they encounter a young runaway named Jimmy Bevlins. Rawlins is initially reluctant to let Bevlins join their party and often remarks, “Somethin bad is going to happen.” During a thunderstorm, Blevins- who is scared of thunder- strips off his clothes, leaves his horse, and takes shelter in a ditch. When the boys find him the next day, Blevin’s horse and gun have been stolen. Soon after in the small village of Encantada, the group spot Blevin’s prized horse, which someone else has claimed. The companions attempt to steal the horse back, but in the aftermath the boys become separated from Blevins. Cole and Rawlins escape from the party perusing them, and travel farther south where they find work as cowhands on an expansive ranch owned by the wealthy Don Hector. While John Grady rises through the ranks …show more content…

Born in 1933, McCarthy grew up the son of a prominent lawyer as one of six children. Despite his upper-class upbringing, McCarthy dropped out of the University of Tennessee, couldn’t hold a steady job, and asked his first wife to support him while he wrote his first book, which consequently lead to their divorce. Even after his writing earned him widespread acclaim, McCarthy still continued to live in hotels, cut his own hair, and do his laundry at a Laundromat. After living in Spain where he became fluent in the language, McCarthy moved to the Southwest where he has lived since the 1970s. During an interview with The New York Times in 1992 Richard B. Woodward recorded that, “McCarthy doesn't write about places he hasn't visited, and he has made dozens of similar scouting forays to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and across the Rio Grande into Chihuahua, Sonora and Coahuila. The vast blankness of the Southwest desert served as a metaphor for the nihilistic violence in his last novel, "Blood Meridian," published in 1985. And this unpopulated, scuffed-up terrain again dominates the background in "All the Pretty Horses," which will appear next month from Knopf” (Woodward). Other prominent works by McCarthy include Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), No Country for Old Men (2005), The Road (2006), and The Sunset Limited (2006): all of which take place in the American West.

Get Access
Related
Get Access