All The Pretty Horses Research Paper

On the inside front cover of a used copy of Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses lies a note, presumably written by someone who had gifted the novel to someone else. The note reads: “In my opinion, the best Western from the best Western author. Great spiritual ruminations.” Upon reading the line ‘the best Western from the best Western author,’ images of gruff and mysterious cowboys catching bandits and riding off into the sunset immediately fills one's head. However, one will almost certainly be surprised to find that All the Pretty Horses contained very little of what most would assume makes a Western great. The protagonists, John Grady and Lacey Rawlins, are far from the larger-than-life cowboys of a spaghetti western; they

All The Pretty Horses is not the ‘best Western’ because it provides what one would expect from a classic Western story, it is the best Western because it does the exact opposite: it provides the reader with the reality of being a young man in one of the least settled and most lawless areas of the world in the mid 19th century. Cormac McCarthy disagrees with the stereotype of the Romantic American West in All the Pretty Horses by alluding to popular Western fiction and by starkly juxtaposing the protagonist’s experiences with the themes of death and love with the stereotypical representation of those themes in popular Western culture. Interestingly, one of the most common ways McCarthy disagrees with the stereotypes of the Romantic American West is by having his characters allude to it. In All the Pretty Horses, John Grady and Lacey Rawlins run away from home in San Angelo, Texas when Grady finds out that his grandmother plans to sell the ranch of his deceased grandfather, rather than keeping it in the family and letting Grady take the

Many Westerns, if they contain a female character at all, often place them in distress, tied to the railroad tracks or kidnapped by a ruthless bounty hunter. They are usually cast to the side, ignored until the final act when the heroic protagonist needs a love interest. All the Pretty Horses not only has its fair share of female characters, including Grady’s grandmother, the Duea Alfonsa, and of course Alejandra, but almost all of them could be described as Hawksian, reminiscent of the leading woman in films of the term’s namesake, Howard Hawks. The most prominent of these characters is Alejandra, daughter of the ranch owner and John Grady’s love interest. Despite being Grady’s opposite throughout most of the story, Alejandra is not a naive woman in need of constant help, she is a powerful woman aware of her status on the ranch and how to use it. She is not ashamed of her liking towards Grady, and when she is told that they cannot be seen together due to her status, she brushes the suggestion aside, insisting that she “will not be treated in such a manner” (McCarthy,