Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses tells the tale of John Grady Cole, a sixteen-year-old young man who decides to leave his Texas home for Mexico to find work after his grandfather has passed away.  Cole’s best friend Lacey Rawlins joins him, and together they ride on and end up caring for Jimmy Blevins, a younger boy who brings with him nothing but trouble. Throughout the novel McCarthy romanticizes the desperado lifestyle, landscape, and mythic role of horses, but McCarthy’s portrayal of the protagonist John Grady Cole rewrites the stereotype as a more sensitive and even androgynous being, showing that love and compassion, not violence, can define the American cowboy.

    In her essay “About Men,” travel writer Gretel Ehrlich argues the cowboys she spent time with while passing through Wyoming overturn the popular stereotype of the cowboy as strong, silent and stoic; instead, Ehrlich contends, the cowboy is a “ balancing act between male and female, manliness and femininity,” which is also a more fitting way to describe the disposition of the McCarthy’s John Grady Cole (84).  Erlich’s main point is that the cowboy is sensitive namely due to his work with animals. Cole is nothing if not a horse whisperer. After breaking his first horses at la hacienda, he continues to build relationships with them and speaks to them softly in Spanish (translated): “I am the commander of the mares . . .I and I alone. Without charity

from my hands you have nothing. Neither food nor water nor children. I am the one who brings

the mares of the mountains, the young mares, the savage ones, and the mares that burn with

passion” (Priola).  Here, we can see that Cole leads the horses with authority but that he also respects them for their own private “passions” and pasts, especially the mares. Thus, we can see he is not only a lonely desperado who has killed a man and cauterized his own wounds with a pistol barrel, but that he represents qualities this, as Erlich reminds us, “Ranchers are midwives, hunters, nurturers, providers, and conservationists all at once” (84).

    Just as a god or higher being might contain the multitudes of the masculine and feminine and all in between and beyond, McCarthy aims to develop Cole in this way. His love for horses and Alejandra, his sensitive conscience, and his inability to commit even vengeful violence show that he is a cowboy more clearly defined by humility and selflessness.

Works Cited

Ehrlich, Gretel. "About Men." The Solace of Open Spaces. New York: Penguin, 1985. 82-85.         Print.

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage, 1993. Print.

Priola, Marty. Translations: All the Pretty Horses, page 128. CormacMcCarthy.com. The Cormac     McCarthy Society, 2016. Web. 14 Feb. 2016.