Parallelism In Cormac Mccarthy's All The Pretty Horses

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, Cormac McCarthy tells the tale of John Grady Cole’s quest to capture the ideal qualities of a cowboy as he sees them: laid-back, unfettered, nomadic and carefree attitudes. These qualities soon clash, however, with the reality of darkness, suffering and mystery that seems to follow him. Reality constantly subverts his ideal dream. Time and time again, John Grady Cole works to be this fantasy, but through reality’s constant rejection of his fantasy, he lives the dream.

As the narrator, Claire creates an emotional and compassionate tone throughout the story. Her dialogue constantly consists of words such as “honey”, “mommy”, “love”, which constitutes to the overall mood of the text (Carver 363). Additionally, she is constantly catering to her husband and child by cooking, cleaning, and performing tasks of the typical “stay-at-home” mom. Her affectionate personality, want for control, and mother-like performance plays a role in Carver’s explanation of the stereotypical mother and wife.

Cormac McCarthy All the Pretty Horses depicts the American romanticized view of the west. John Grady, emerging from a dilapidated family ventures out on a journey in pursuit of his dream of the cowboy lifestyle. Through out the novel there is a constant tension between John Grady destiny or fate and the nature of his dreams. Dreams keep the dreamer from reality and because they are unreal, they paralyze the dreamer’s reality. Nonetheless, they motivate his journey through Mexico. The different roles that his dreams play depict the different characters that John Grady assumes: the Texas teenager, the lover, the prisoner and the man. John Grady’s

In the book titled “All the Pretty Horses” by Cormac Mccarthy, 16 year old John Grady Cole decides that he wants to build a ranch at his home in Texas. However, when his grandfather says no, him and his friend, Rawlins, go on a journey down south to mexico to build a ranch themselves. The author’s purpose for writing the story was to inform the audience that if someone tells you not to do something then don’t do it because nine times out of ten, it is mostly because the outcome might not always be what you expected. Mccarthy often uses different styles of descriptive and imagery writing to help the reader better understand the book and what Grady is getting himself into. I personally believe that the author gets his point across effectively

She figured out McCandless had a hard time talking and connecting with other people because of the disconnect from his biological family, “It was pretty obvious he didn’t get along with his family, but he never said much about any of them except Carine…”. Westerberg suspected McCandless had a falling out with his father but didn’t question him any farther. This epigraph identifies with McCandless because he left his family without giving an explanation as well and it was due to the differences he had with his own family.

In his journey across the landscape of Mexico, John’s character in the novel begins to transform. He is beginning to move away from that boyish and naive kind of behavior and more towards the middle stage of between being a boy and a man; adolescence. McCarthy spends a great deal in describing John’s adolescent’s stage in this novel. Much of the time that McCarthy describes in this stage is when they are out on the prairie with the horses connecting with nature. This connection allows John to have and a clearer understanding that there is a divine line between men and horses and that you can’t apply the same characteristics that you would apply to a horse to a man.

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.

In Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, the concept of understanding sacrifice to establish a greater moral good is central to the main characters and their developed values. Specifically, McCarthy incorporates a great sacrifice of young love made by John Crady Cole’s love interest, Alejandra. Alejandra strategically surrenders her promising relationship with John Grady in order to accomplish a greater agenda: bailing him out of jail therefore, assuring the forbiddance of their of their future union. In this instance, the sacrifice of love and union reveals the character’s deeper values rooted in moral obligation. This passionate act of love exemplifies Alejandra’s strength and selflessness, while also displaying a deeper understanding to the overall meaning of the book by highlighting how valuable friendships and relationships come at a great cost.

The title of the book is a direct reference to the cowboy strike of 1883, which is represented in the novel when the cowboys left their jobs as cowhands for the cattle drives and demanded higher wages, hoping to cripple the big cattle companies that hindered the cowboys with their issuing of strict rules. Going against his own morality and wishes, Hitch takes half of Charlie’s men and leads them to join the strike. Hitch himself is a strong independent man that always keeps his promises which is also

The first way that horses play a major role in developing a theme of the story is through their use as symbolism. Horses seem to represent all of nature throughout the story, as they are often the only natural entity that is vividly described. Even though John Grady is experienced with horses, there is still some wilderness about them that even he can’t understand. The idea that horses, or nature, are a lot more durable than humans will ever be is an idea that John Grady himself reinforces in some of his dreams. Early in the story in one of John’s dream he realizes that “the order in the horse's heart was more durable for it was written in a place where no rain could erase it" (McCarthy). This idea adds to the fact that horses seem to represent a lasting entity, a species that will continue to exist overtime. Continuing with the idea of horses as a use of symbolism, is

John Grady Cole, the last in a long line of west Texas ranchers, is, at sixteen, poised on the sorrowful, painful edge of manhood. When he realizes the only life he has ever known is disappearing into the past and that cowboys are as doomed as the Comanche who came before them, he leaves on a dangerous and harrowing journey into the beautiful and utterly foreign world that is Mexico. In the guise of a classic Western, All the Pretty Horses is at its heart a lyrical and elegiac coming-of-age story about love, friendship, and loyalty that will leave John Grady, and the reader, changed forever. When his mother decides to sell the cattle ranch he has grown up working, John Grady Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins

She sometimes sits out by the creek and remembers her father telling her “I am your father, I will never abandon you.” (Cisneros 1) She remembers this only after she is a mother and this is when she realizes “How when a man and a woman love each other, sometimes that love sours. But a parent’s love for a child, a child’s for its parents, is another thing entirely.” (Cisneros 1) Surely by now she feels her love souring. She can not understand why Juan must drink all time and why he continues to beat after he promises that he will never do it again.

Although the story gains a greater sense of symbolism through the use of animals as characters, it also looses a concrete identity for the characters. By deciding to use generic images to differentiate the characters from one another within the illustrations, Spiegelman has generalized

Charlie’s current thoughts are brimming with the memories of his broken past. Like most Americans during the Jazz Age, he invested his money in the stock market and hit the jackpot. He acquired a plethora of riches and found love. "We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us" (Fitzgerald 202). Charlie and his wife, Helen, were living the high-life in Paris. Rather than investing that money for the future, they wasted it on whatever they desired. Partying was their way of living and the constant drinking lead to alcoholism. Not only were they physically drunk, but they were emotionally inebriated. Sobriety was no longer their reality. They were dreaming in a fantasy realm and nothing was going to wake them up. However, Helen’s death was the beginning of a nightmare. Every restaurant, store, and bar, was a reminder to Charlie of his older self. These very reminders were feeding into his downfall. James