All The Pretty Horses Literary Analysis

I believe that the novel “All the Pretty Horses” by Cormac McCarthy is a coming of age story about a young man who initially set out to make a life for himself in a land that wasn’t so industrialized and in turn grew up and lost his innocence. John Grady was a young, naïve 16-year-old who was unhappy with the way “his” country was changing, so he set off with his friend Rawlins on a quest to find a place he wanted to call home. John Grady had child-like ideations that, while he couldn’t find the type of life he wanted here in America because the ranch he grew up on and that his family owned would soon be sold, he would be able to find a simpler lifestyle in Mexico. In all reality, there was no amount of life experience that would prepare John Grady and Rawlins for the trials and tribulations they would encounter on their quest for independence and a better life. I trust that part of the reason John Grady was taking on this endeavor was because he was sick of losing everything in his life that he loved, so he was trying to hold on to being a cowboy, because I believe if he lost that, it may just truly break his heart. He lost his mother to her love of acting, he just dealt with the passing of his grandfather, he knows that his father’s health is failing and now he is coming to grips with the fact that he is going to lose his family’s ranch. Leaving on this voyage was his way of acting like a petulant child and refusing to evolve the way his family, and America for that matter, were evolving. He just could not bare to live a life that wasn’t completely his way, so he ran away. What he didn’t realize was that him running away would make him more of an adult and eventually completely steal his innocence. What started him on this track was meeting the very immature 13-year-old, Jimmy Blevins. While Rawlins is just absolutely exasperated by Blevins’ very existence, John Grady isn’t too bothered and I think at some point takes a liking to him. He tries to coax him into being more mature and for a while I think it works, until that fateful storm that in the end would cause poor, naïve Blevins’ untimely demise. After the boys lose Blevins, John Grady realizes life still has to go on and the boys have to find what they had set out to search for in the first place: a new beginning. …show more content…
Unfortunately, I think that John Grady’s naivety shows again when he and Rawlins are hired on to work at the hacienda. The boys needed a job, but John Grady noticed the girl and that may have been the mitigating factor to him choosing that specific ranch to begin to call home. “Did you see that little darlin? he said. John Grady didn’t answer. He was still looking down the road where she’d gone. There was nothing there to see, but he was looking anyway” (McCarthy, 94). How did John Grady know that this was going to be a decent place to work? He didn’t, but he knew that she would be close, so that may have been a big reason as to why they stayed. Luckily for them, John Grady and Rawlins are very hard workers and ended up fitting in well at the hacienda. John Grady even was able to begin to ‘break’ the new horses because they noticed the talent he had. The boys ‘breaking’ the new 3-year-old colts was a symbol for their journey as well. They were making it so the horses were ridable and workable and in turn I think that was making the boys more mature and possibly ‘breaking’ them of their wilder side. Inopportunely, not enough of John Grady’s wild side was broken because he ended up falling in love with the forbidden daughter of the hacienda. Even though Rawlins told him this was a bad idea, he went for it anyway and snuck around and had a torrid affair with the lovely Alejandra. Being in love with Alejandra had dire consequences though. Because of the earlier issues that Blevins had caused, when the law finally caught up with them,