What Is The Theme Of All The Pretty Horses By Cormac Mccarthy Mature

All the Wise and Pretty Horses

“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” (Helen Keller). Just as Helen Keller said, people cannot mature and develop character without experiencing life.
For many, the events one lives through shapes the kind of person they are, and for some, one event can be the key difference between an innocent child and a mature adult. In Cormac McCarthy’s, “All the Pretty Horses,” this is just the case with character John Grady. At first, Grady is able to see the world with fire-like imagery, adding a sense of imagination and desire to even the most mundane tasks. Yet, when he kills a man, the

When Grady is arrested for something he did not do, the world is entirely against him, and before he can escape the worst prison fight, he realizes, “It was too late to rise again,” (198). McCarthy shows the shift by steadily shifting the tone, making a gloomy situation steady fade into a fight for survival. This shift shows that Grady is losing his innocent self, while simultaneously accepting that life is out of his control. In this moment, John Grady is trapped against a wall, his neck almost being slit until he, “...brought his knife up from the floor and sank it into the chichillero’s heart,” (201). As he fights for his life, Grady experiences both a near death instance and a death that he caused, changing the way he views the world. Suddenly, it death is becoming a real topic to him because he has actually seen it. The boy who never thought he could kill did. McCarthy includes the murder of a prisoner as the pivotal moment in Grady’s life to emphasize maturity as a direct result of experiencing

If the killing was meant to be a turning point, then the results must be clear. Just as Rawlins and John Grady get out of jail, they start talking about what went down, resulting in Grady admitting that he, “...never thought [he’d] do that,” (215). As the story progresses, there is a serious shift in the kind of dialogue exchanged, going from words with no meaning to sentences that tell days of life. Grady is accepting how fragile life is, and he starts to see that things are not as easy as they always seemed. Had he not killed the man, this change would not have happened. By the time Grady returns to Texas, he has to speak to a judge about what all went down in Mexico, forcing Grady to own up to the fact that, “[He] just happened to get the best of him,” (291). Even when the issue is not the actual reason Grady is in court, the event is still weighing on his mind, shaping his actions from then on. It seems that, because of the murder, Grady starts to take more responsibilities for his actions, something he would not have considered if the man had never died. Without the death, Grady could have stayed as a much weaker