The West in All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses paints an image of a dying West: a West that is no longer what it used to be. It is through this changed, more modernized western landscape that McCarthy explores the idealized tropes of the western hero, the cowboy and the romantic vision of the lifestyle of western settlement. It is also through this unromantic view of the land and space that McCarthy is able to create John Grady Cole’s character to be a failed version of the stereotypical western hero. John Grady strives continuously to live in the way of the West that had been popular during his grandfather’s era. But, just as the old West is passing away, John Grady’s grandfather’s ranch is passed along to the highest bidder, representing the loss of a possibility at an idyllic Western ranching lifestyle.

In All the Pretty Horses, the West in America is not “Western” enough for John Grady’s ideals, and so he chooses to go to Mexico, in hopes that he can achieve his desires there. John Grady fails to achieve anything but fleeting success and romance through out the book, thus proving him to be a failed western hero, unable to accomplish what true western men easily achieve. He is also unable to maintain the cowboy code of justice and honor, shown when he tries to return the horse to it’s rightful owner, but cannot find said owner at all. Though John Grady’s stoic, “man-of-few-words” persona lasts through the entirety of the novel, he ultimately rides off, “into the darkening land, the world to come” as a man with no true place that he owns and belongs to (302). He is uprooted, a wanderer, still searching for an ideal that cannot be achieved. It is in this way that McCarthy examines how the cowboy stereotype shifts and ultimately fails within a new, more modern West.