All The Pretty Horses

The title All the Pretty Horses alludes to a traditional American lullaby, “All the Pretty Little Horses,” which is of unclear origin. The horses of the lullaby are a promise to a child and an invocation to dream, and McCarthy taps into that desire in John Grady’s character, whose love and respect for horses is a clear driver of his journey and his identity; when he’s in prison, the novel even goes so far as to say “horses [are] always the right thing to think about” (204). McCarthy evokes the lullaby to connect John Grady’s infatuation with an idealized version of the American West to the living animals that embody his dreams and values.

Horses are often described with lush detail, emphasizing their inextricable role in ranching life and vaquero culture. McCarthy builds on this portrayal to establish a dual identity in horses in Part 2. First, horses are natural beings that belong outside of the domain of humanity and have a spiritual significance. When they are up in the mountains, an old man John Grady works with tells him “it would be pointless to speak of no horses in the world for God would not permit such a thing” (111). In this habitat, the animals are wild and free, and the novel positions them as more virtuous than humanity and as corrupted by man, though the old man also takes pains to note that horses love war as man does. McCarthy aligns the wild horses with the notion of the “wild west” or American frontier, a common symbolic alignment in the western genre. To John Grady, horses are the living essence of the world in its natural—and best—state.

The second identity of horses is a more pragmatic one: They are drivers of the economy and lifestyle that John Grady loves. He has a deep knowledge of horsemanship and an encyclopedic understanding of the lineage and ownership of famous horses. Though John Grady idealizes wild horses and the uncorrupted natural world, he and Rawlins are aligned with humanity in their taming and training of the mountain colts. For John Grady, the solution to this cognitive dissonance is to place it beyond his expertise, as when Rawlins asks why rubbing a towel over a horse calms it, and John Grady replies, “I dont know. […] I aint a horse” (106). With this pithy dismissal, John Grady attempts to elevate his vocation from practical know-how to spiritual stewardship of the animals he reveres. The name of the ranch, La Purísima, translates to “purest” in English, echoing John Grady’s belief that ranching is the highest and most natural pursuit of a man. At La Purísima, John Grady believes he can live a pure—meaning uncompromised—life.

John Grady sees his connection to horses and his success and happiness in working with them as the primary source of value in his life, and horses relate to or influence most of his significant experiences in the novel. His romance with Alejandra is built around a mutual love for the animals and begins with each of them riding a horse acquired explicitly for sexual reproduction; his sense of responsibility toward his, Blevins’s, and Rawlins’s mounts drives his mission to get them back from the captain. He is also in the greatest peril when separated from his horse. After the captain confiscates their horses, Blevins is murdered, and John Grady and Rawlins are incarcerated. Later, in the shootout, it’s specifically John Grady’s connection to the horses that saves him—his awareness of where Blevins’s horse is looking helps him predict an ambush, and his knowledge of how his horses will react to gunfire helps him control the situation. Horses represent the world that John Grady understands and navigates best.

At the end of the novel, John Grady still loves horses, but he now bears the weight of responsibility for Blevins’s horse, a constant reminder of his failure to save Blevins’s life and his desire to enact vengeance. The horse-centered culture of the American West is changing, but John Grady is determined to cling to it, even as some elements of it are now reminders of the pain and loss he’s suffered.