Cormac Mccarthy All The Pretty Horses Analysis

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, takes place during the late 1940s. It is a story about a young man named John Grady Cole, a sixteen year old who is the last of a generation of the West Texas ranchers in his family. John Grady Cole takes a journey across the border to Mexico, after his grandfather's death, to retain his dream of living the cowboy life that he grew up with.As the story unfolds, John Gady Cole encounters a variety of obstacles that determines if his dreams are meant to be or if his fate will overpower his desires. McCarthy incorporates a variety of literary devices, internal conflict, and tone to achieve his theme of romanticism and reality.
John Grady Cole grew up the cowboy way, and after his grandfather's death, he has been challenged with the fact that he may not live this life anymore. John Grady chooses to hold on to the old ways of time such as working with wild horses, a job that was more of a dream to him, but the changes of time are not on his side. In the beginning of the novel, McCarthy states, “What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All

In Sarah Gleeson-White’s article, Playing Cowboys: Genre, Myth, and Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, she talks about how “Cormac McCarthy moved from the South to the Southwest in the 1970s, so did the settings and associated meanings of his novels.” This novel is somewhat related to the background of the author and the transitions they went through. John Grady Cole is a representation of the last generation cowboy of Western ancestry. As written in All the Pretty Horses, “People dont feel safe no more, he said. We’re like the Comanches was two hundred years ago. We dont know what’s goin to show up here come daylight.” (McCarthy p. 25-26) John Grady’s father is talking to him about the last of their kind, also a reflection to the last of that time