All The Pretty Horses Character Analysis

Cormac McCarthy, through his two acclaimed novels, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, details the physical and spiritual journey of two young characters, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, who yearn for lives on unblemished lands where they can make their own decisions, but come to realize that life’s experiences can make those decisions for you. John and Billy begin the expedition full of youthful innocence only to confront the everyday harsh realities of the modern world, realities that test their ethics, morals, and have them evaluate God’s role in everyone’s lives. They struggle to make sense and order of a world that is full of violence, betrayal, and loss. John and Billy both personally experience bloodshed (John’s jail term and Boyd’s

This imperfect world places John Grady inside a rough “prison cell where all is silent”, and he copes with the violence and Dueña Alfonsa’s betrayal of him by “dream[ing] of horses and wildflowers”(Frye 105). McCarthy details the dreams with the imagery of landscape and wildlife (horses, plants, and wolves) that the characters crave. The dreams are able to provide a sense of security to the characters that are yearning for relief in the harsh, flawed world. John in prison has a dream “of horses in the field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers… And they moved all of them in a resonance that was like music among them and they were none of them afraid… And they ran in that resonance which is the world itself which cannot be spoken but only praised”(All the Pretty Horses 161-162). John returns to a time of comfort and solace in his life, his time outdoors, when he is in unfamiliar and scary situations. Billy also encounters troubling times that lead him to dream of animals and nature. On one of Billy’s many journeys into Mexico with his brother Boyd, Billy and Boyd become separated, a separation from the last remnant of his comfortable youth. Therefore Billy begins to search for Boyd and finds him. It is during this troubling and stressful time in Billy’s life that he once again dreams of the landscape and wildlife to comfort him. He dreams about walking towards “a darkened house” where “wolves had followed him“ and Billy “knelt in the snow and reached out his arms to them and they touched his with their wild muzzles and drew away again and their breath was warm and it smelled of the earth and the heart of the earth” (Crossing 295). Billy dreams of a familiar scenario in his life and past memories, enjoyment of the outdoors, and specifically