All The Pretty Horses Analysis
3598 Words15 Pages
In spite of difference ideologies, race, nationality, and gender, All the Pretty Horses has been credited with representing a new cowboy protagonist who is coming to conflict and ruin as he rides through landscape. Although the 16 years adolescent John Grady Cole reflects the culture of Texas ranching, All The Pretty Horses responds to the frontier 's modernization. The protagonist, John Grady Cole is conscious that something is 'happing to country '.
The novel concerns the disappearance of the cowboy in the wake of an increasingly urbanized American society, and the attempts of John Grady to resist it. He does this by heading southwest into Mexico, where he hopes to maintain a pastoral lifestyle. however, what John Grady discover there, is a world also subject to change. This modern catastrophe meant for a cowboy was his disappearance. By 1951, the cowboy 's frontier faded though still exist physically, and cowboys faded with the frontier. It is no longer a pastoral land in the pressures of urbanization and industrialization. This erasure of frontier 's open space was an identity crisis for those cowboys.
One can highlight John Grady 's identity crisis as he fails to create stable identity. Phillip Snyder argues that the trilogy 's protagonists (John Grady and Billy Parham) prove to create stable identities. Snyder 's analysis concentrates on their development into interlocutor communities that help define their identities as 'cowboy
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