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All the Pretty Horses-Structure Essay

Decent Essays

The book All the Pretty Horses is a western drama about teenage cowboys as they transition from adolescence into manhood. The author, Cormac McCarthy, structures the book using echo words and parallel structure that links dialogue exchanges and makes the scenes flow smoothly. McCarthy is a master of this sort of repetition and uses this structure throughout the entire book. There are many examples of this used throughout the book, but the author primarily focuses on the interpersonal relationships, diversity, and change. There are many different types of relationships based on a very vast scale. John Grady Cole has many complicated and some not-so-complicated relationships with his friends and family members. In book 1, McCarthy informs …show more content…

Another key parallel theme in the book revolves around diversity between John Grady’s homeland-the United States- and his new home in Mexico. On page 25 of book 1 it says, “The last thing his father said was that the country would never be the same” which relates to book 4 in many ways. One relation occurs on page 299 which states, “I don’t know, said John Grady…I don’t know what happens to a county.” In this scene he is reflecting on how things have changed and how there are many differences between events on his homeland in Texas and the events that occur in Mexico. A more direct relation is in book 1 when the boys (John Grady, Rawlins, and Blevins) cross the Rio Grande naked and then in book 4 when John Grady crosses Rio Grande naked-heading back to Texas. The sense of home and the countries boarder really affects John Grady and how he makes decisions based on where he is. The last key theme in the book concerns how John Grady changes during the course of the novel. In book 1 John Grady is ignorant to reality and is just looking for an adventure. On page 5 of book 1 it states, “He stood like a man come to the end of something.” This quote is ironic because it saying that John Grady is posing as a man at the end of something which is silly since it’s just the beginning of the story. The parallel event that corresponds to this occurs on page 254

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