All the Pretty Horses Themes

The horses are about the only thing that's pretty in our novel's world. Our heroes wander through desolate landscape and bleached bones, and the book closes on John Grady riding into a blood-red cl...

Fate brings together strange pairs in All the Pretty Horses, like Blevins with Rawlins and John Grady, as well as John and the Cuchillero. These meetings are fateful, in that they produce serious c...

There are plenty of rugged frontiersman in the novel: while "man-boy" may be new slang, the protagonists of All the Pretty Horses are more like "boy-men." While young, they have the swagger, indepe...

Revenge is one of the more subtle and complicated themes in All the Pretty Horses, as characters balance compassion with toughness, and respect for life with awareness of danger. They nurse wounds...

All the Pretty Horses is bookended by two funerals at the Grady ranch: the first is that of John's grandfather, and the second is that of Abuela. There are bleached bones in the landscape, the cons...

The traditions of the upper classes are an issue in All the Pretty Horses—not because of the class divide between Alejandra and John exactly, but because of the expectations and social customs th...

All the Pretty Horses begins with a desire for escape, its most dramatic action is spurred by the head-on collision with the customs of a foreign land, and it ends with the sense that its hero ulti...

The journey that John and Rawlins take into Mexico not long after World War II suggests a world seemingly untouched by modernity. It can't be considered a comprehensive portrait of the country, bec...