Red in Cormac McCarthy's West

Frequently paired with John Grady’s romantic imaginings of the West as it was in the past, as well as the scenes of Grady riding on horseback, color imagery in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses mimics the dying and fading found within the pages. Throughout the novel, the color red can be interpreted as the colorful, visual representation of the dying out of the Old West, the realization of unattainable ideals, and violence in different parts of the book. Sometimes (as during the sunsets and the panoramic scenes of horseback riding) this redness is vibrant and romantic. During other times it is violent and bloody (as it is during the cauterizing of the wounds towards the end of the novel), and still other times (mostly in the beginning of the book) there is a sense of burning nostalgia for a time gone by that is paired with the hue.

            The sunset at the beginning of McCarthy’s text contrasts with that found on the last page of the novel, as it brings the color red into the conclusion as well as weaves it significantly into the themes of the book. In the sunset at the end, redness colors all aspects of the scene including, “the dust he raised, the small dust that powered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him” (McCarthy 302). John Grady’s desire for the old, idyllic West and his ultimate failure to find that desire in reality is painted across the entire landscape, burning a scarlet “bloodred” as he rides onward. The cowboy ideals of justice and honor that he strived for, the connection with the land and the horses and the way of life that he yearned for have all eluded him and left him without land to claim as his own: just as he was in the beginning. John Grady’s imagined West proves to be too great and irreconcilable in comparison to the reality of the land that he has discovered in his journey from the States to Mexico. He rides away from the space, just as he rode away from his family’s land in the beginning of the novel, “with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land”, painted with the color just as the sky and the ground are. Just as the last light bleeds itself across the West, John Grady’s ideals do the same, symbolically represented by the color imagery of crimson.