Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Ah, everyone's favorite imagery.
There's no getting around Death-with-a-capital-D in All the Pretty Horses. And it's pretty bleak on this front: from the funeral parlor and bleached horse skull that opens the novel to the burial scene that closes it, death is never far from the characters' minds or their reality, permeating the landscape about.
The novel's opening, in a scene directly after the first funeral, imagines a land haunted by the ghosts of Comanche Indians, whose lives the narrator says were "pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only" (18). Blood and violent death is not unknown in the novel, as in the scene where John "brought his knife up from the floor and sank it into [an assailant's] heart. He sank it into his heart and snapped the handle sideways and broke the blade off in him" (2995).
Even in death, however, there is often an odd dash of some underlying connection, or even something artistic, like the flower of blood that appears on the shirt of John's assassin as they fall into a kind of embrace:
"From the red boutonniere blossoming on the left pocket of his blue workshirt there spurted a thin fan of bright arterial blood. He dropped to his knees and pitched forward dead into the arms of his enemy." (2995)
A similar scene occurs when John shoots a doe:
"When he reached her she lay in her blood in the grass and he knelt with the rifle and put his hand on her neck and she looked at him and her eyes were warm and wet and there was no fear in them and then she died." (3788)
There is a strange serenity or moment of shared feeling in each of these passages, despite the fact that one living being killed another.
Check out the ending where John passes into the red, darkening sunset, with a "solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment" (4051), and you just may wonder where it all leads: the color red is ominous and suggestive of death, while the dust, obscurity, and the thrashing of the bull suggests physical suffering.
The Native Americans watching him pass expect him to vanish, much like the novel suggests that they have when exploring the ghosts of their past in the novel's beginning. Everywhere things are temporary and filled with foreboding, barrenness, or torment. Is John going to vanish into the landscape permanently like they did, or is there more meaning to life in the novel than the fact of passing on?