Cormac Mccarthy All The Pretty Horses Analysis

Everyone has a different way to deal with overwhelming situations. It can be more difficult for people with mental illness to cope with the hardships of life. For instance, in “Horses of the Night,” the character of Chris has dissociative symptoms that can be linked to his depression. Margaret Laurence’s short story tells the story of Chris, a young teenager who moves to from a small farm to the town of Manawaka in order to go to high school. The story is told by his younger cousin, Vanessa. As she grows up, she learns that Chris is depressed. The author uses the theme of fantasy to show that he does not cope well with reality. The horses, Shallow Creek, and the children are symbols that show us the fantasy that Chris lives in.

“I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.” (Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses) Humans are fallen, they have a tendency to be self centered and for one to take themselves out of their own body and see themselves, in the way they think and process images and words is

They plodded on, thin and filthy as street addicts. Cowled in their blankets against the cold and their breath smoking, shuffling through the black and silky drifts…. and the noon sky black as the cellars of hell. He held the boy against him, cold to the bone. Dont lose heart, he said. We’ll be all right (The Road 177).

The specific explanation of a scene can change depending on who sees it and how they choose to interpret it. The scene of the book that I have chosen is on page 99-102. The scene is when the Vaqueros bring in wild colts from the mesa stuck out to me. The scene shows John Grady’s knowledge and care of horses and shows the common misconceptions of a horse by Rawlings. The scene also shows the level of confidence that John Grady has in his own ability with horses and the trust that Rawlins has in him when it comes to break the horses in only four days. As the owner of the ranch gave the permission to try, while still say in not so nice a way they had no chance, you can assume he had faith in them.

In the novel, "all the pretty horses" McCarthy, uses a sixteen-year-old boy, John Grady Cole, who runs away from his home in an attempt to start a new life. With the one, he was closest to dead, and his mom selling the ranch he experienced childhood with, John Grady leaves San Angelo with no second thoughts. This idea of separation is strengthened all through the book, yet generally in the last a large portion of; it is unmistakable that John Grady feels no connection to Texas or his family any longer, as he says, "I have no country" (p.299). He no more has a feeling of being; nor sense of independence. It's this sense of separation McCarthy provides for further John Grady's character advancement. As All the Pretty Horses unwinds, through

In a journey across the vast untamed country of Mexico, Cormac McCarthy introduces All the Pretty Horses, a bittersweet and profoundly moving tale of love, hate, disappointments, joy, and redemption. John Grady sets out on horseback to Mexico with his best friend Lacey Rawlins in search of the cowboy lifestyle. His journey leaves John wiser but saddened, yet out of this heartbreak comes the resilience of a man who has claimed his place in the world as a true cowboy. In his journey John’s character changes and develops throughout the novel to have more of a personal relationship with the horses and Mother Nature. He changes from a young boy who knows nothing of the world

In Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole's departure of America and search for identity leads him on a tortuous journey. Sprouting in San Angelo, Texas, John Grady Cole blossoms into life on a ranch his grandfather presides over. His grandfather dies when he is just sixteen, causing him to depart America - the country he once called home - with his best friend Lacey Rawlins for Mexico, to be cowboys. As he explores the southern country, he feels that Mexico is exactly where he belongs. But, during his visit, he runs into trouble as he falls in love with a ranch owner's daughter who comes from a strictly traditional family, he is jettisoned in a moral-absent jail, and he stabs a man to death. Because Cole has nowhere else

In All the Pretty Horses, in order for Cormac McCarthy to tell her story uses many literary devices; circular movement, imagery, and polysyndeton. McCarthy gives her readers a glance at John Grady Cole’s lifestyle - heartbreak, his culture, and the death of loved ones. The parallelism allows us, as the reader, to increase our understanding of the protagonist’s journey.

Horses in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses serve as a significant symbol throughout John Grady’s narrative. Horses represent “all that is good and beautiful within the novel” (Mundik 16). McCarthy reveals, however, that horses, like people, must eventually be broken. Throughout the novel, idyllic horses are broken by the taming of John Grady, yet John Grady’s idealism endures as he brings the horses out of cynical Mexico and into optimistic America. All the Pretty Horses uses horses as a symbol to express the theme that while difficulties are ever-present and inevitable, goodness, beauty, and idealism can still remain within the framework of reality.

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.

In Cormac McCarthy’s Bildungsroman All the Pretty Horses, sixteen year old John Grady Cole runs away from his home in San Angelo, Texas, after the death of his grandfather. With the divorce of his parents and his mom’s plans to sell the family ranch, John Grady finds no reason to stay in Texas. Accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, John Grady travels south into Mexico on horseback in search of the cowboy life he’s always yearned for. While America industrializes, Mexico continues to provide large ranches, wild horses, and vast land. America represents the idealized West while Mexico represents the reality of the West which consists of bloodshed and heartache. McCarthy uses the contrast between America and Mexico to invoke the idea that the West is more violent and blood-thirsty than often depicted in movies and stories.

Deserts existing as oceans. Ends leading to beginnings. Making reality a dream, and dreams a reality. John Grady Cole's disillusionment of life and the cowboy way is a murky mirage of dualities that parallel the contradictions of his romantic ideas and the cruelty of reality. "Real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal," John Grady sees life as inherently good, as a dream, but life is not pleasantries and pretty horses and this reality will bring his head out of the clouds and force him to accept things as they truly are. The duality of the novel All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy is a direct reflection of John Grady's unbroken struggle to keep the romantic west alive in an unforgiving and unromantic world; the conflict of the ideas mirrors the overall conflict of the novel.

Fate plays a very powerful role throughout this novel. The idea that everything is inevitably planned. In the beginning of the novel John Grady, seems pretty content with the idea of fate, although his idea of fate was that he would be the one taking over his deceased grandfather. When that didn't work out he took fate into his own hands and went out in the world in search for his future with his best friend and right hand man Lacy Rawlins. When certain things begin to happen to Grady and Rawlins, his view of fate is somewhat confused and he does whatever he can to resent against the laws and create his own fate.

McCarthy utilizes blood along with the color red to illustrate the connection between men and nature. He often used them together to describe landscapes. At John Grady’s grandfather's funeral, the scenery depicted with the “blood red” sun and “the reefs of bloodred cloud.” (McCarthy 5) Here, McCarthy painted this vivid picture to illuminate John Grady’s captivation of the past. In this case, John Grady was still engrossed in the events of his grandfather’s death and, ultimately, his old life at the ranch. On a boarder scale, John Grady was simply attached to the past, to the ideal life where human and nature were at their rawest. Even the road that he rode on was viewed as being “pledge in blood and redeemable in blood only.” (McCarthy 5) However,

“The Rocking Horse Winner” is a short story written by D.H Lawrence that follows the short and tragic life of a boy named Paul, who assumes he has amazing luck after realizing he can predict racehorse winners by furiously riding his rocking horse until he reaches a trance-like state. Unfortunately, as his family takes advantage of his gift and starts gaining more money, Paul’s luck begins to kill him. Literally. Throughout the story, there are several themes evident, such as wealth, life, conscious, existence; luck, family, and greed. The conflicts displayed are man vs man, man vs self, and man vs. society. The rocking horse has become an obsession for paul and the potential benefits it would have on his family, ultimately not knowing the actual harm it will cause.