Rhetoric of Conquering in All the Pretty Horses

When we read the Ox Bow incident, we talked about how Kinkaid represents the west, and how the major driving force behind the plot of the novel was to recover the idea of the west.  McCarthy also seems to be tackling the idea of controlling the frontier.  At the beginning of section two, one of the most important scenes is when the two boys are breaking the new colts (pages 102-105).  The language McCarthy chooses to describe the process of breaking the horses is particularly interesting.  First on page 102 he says, “The horses shifted and stood, gray shapes in the gray morning. Stacked on the ground outside the gate were coils of every kind of rope.”  Immediately, the horses are equated with nature and the environment through the repetition of the word gray.  However, contrasting that is the image of man-made ropes that will be used to constrain them.  McCarthy strategically presents these two images side by side.  Another piece to fold into this scene is on page 103 when McCarthy writes, “They did not smell like horses.  They smelled like what they were, wild animals” as if somehow the designation of ‘horse’ does not belong to the creature until it has been tamed.  If we take horses as a representation of the west (and they seem to be presented as such) then somehow the west is not the west until someone claims it.  I think this speaks to the myth that the west was empty, when in reality, settlers actually stole it from plenty of people already there.  To reinforce this idea, the image of the horses on page 105, and their horror as they are trussed up and separated, would seem to mirror the experience of the native people in the west.  As the novel moves forward, the metaphor of horses as the west should be attended to, as it seems that McCarthy has a particular message in mind.