All the Pretty Horses Analysis

In All the Pretty Horses, it's all about the land. Land land land. For all that, however, the land is strikingly barren, consisting mainly of wide expanses of open road, dirt, and ramshackle villag...

The narrator in All the Pretty Horses would like you to think he's some sort of mysterious dude who sits on the sidelines at a party, rarely speaking but occasionally offering up some weird insight...

All the Pretty Horses involves gunfights, horse riding, ranches, and bare, tumbleweed-tossed towns—so yeah, it's a western all right, even if it is set in the mid-20th century. It's also packed w...

The tone of All The Pretty Horses is a lot like our boy John Grady Cole: not very flowery, emotional, or friendly, and not prone to digressions or speechifying. You won't see any question marks or...

All The Pretty Horses is no love-fest, that's for sure. To match this, the writing style is minimalist: the narrator uses only enough language to describe what's happening, and hardly any more. As...

All the Pretty Horses gets its title from a lullaby of the same name. There are slight variations in the title and lyrics of the lullaby, but the key passage goes a little something like this:Hush-...

The novel ends with John Grady riding off into the sunset like a good cowboy, but this is no John Wayne-style happy ending. Though the hero has been toughened by his experiences, he finds himself i...

While the plot and major issues in All the Pretty Horses always become clear eventually, the narrator has a tendency to abruptly skip forward in time or refer to key people as only "he" or "she," k...

A Boy and His HorseSo, in case you were fooled by the title, there is nothing pretty about John Grady Cole's life—horses or no. The beginning of the novel follows John around through changes in h...

Anticipation Stage and 'Fall' into the Other WorldWhen we begin the novel, John's world has been turned upside down by the death of his grandfather and the subsequent loss of the ranch, which has b...

The first act of the book begins with the funeral of John's grandfather and lasts until the boys steal back Blevins's horse. After that point, there's no turning back—the boys are connected by th...

All the Pretty Horses was McCarthy's first big publishing success. He used the money to buy a new pickup truck. Oh, Cormac. (Source) Aside from the film version of All the Pretty Horses, several ot...

The horses aren't the only things that are pretty, if you catch our drift. We're told little of the actual details of what happens between Alejandra and John, but yeah, the lake scene—where John...

Historical ReferencesWorld War II (27, 100)Annie Oakley (756)Mexican colonizing legislation of 1824 (1458)Gustavo Madero (3400-16)Francisco Madero (2071, 3400-16, 3420)Mexican Civil War (2071, 3414...