In theme, the adventure to a foreign country where war has altered the culture is similar to Hemingway’s World War I and Spanish Civil War works Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Although John Grady and Rawlins do not fight in a war themselves, their lives are forever altered, not only by World War II, but by the Mexican Revolution, which took place 40 years before their adventure. Other echoes of Hemingway appear in the masculine skill with the wilderness and horses that both John Grady and Rawlins possess (John Grady is called one of the best riders alive by his friends, and his process is well confirmed by McCarthy’s descriptions).
In addition, from Hemingway, McCarthy gets inspiration for his characters. Men of few words who camp, hunt, and fish, men who have their own codes and try to do right, be brave, and perform with grace—these are the characters who influence McCarthy’s cowboys in the Border Trilogy books. In John Grady and Rawlins’ sidekick, Blevins, who joins the two boys near the border, we find a quite Faulknerian character, one who brings to the novel humor as well as danger, with his tenacious single-mindedness.
Finally, when noting the influences of other writers on McCarthy’s work, we cannot overlook Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The similarities are striking: A young boy runs away from home to seek adventure and fortune, and, in the process, he must mature, grow, and learn to survive in a world different from the one he imagined.
A brief comment on language and culture in All the Pretty Horses. Cormac McCarthy, in this first novel of the Border Trilogy, uses numerous Spanish words and phrases. Most often, these words are clear to the careful reader, because he either repeats the word in English or explains the meaning before or after he uses it in Spanish. However, many other instances of Spanish phrases are not explained by surrounding English text. In those instances, readers may succeed at trying to decipher the text by looking for clues in English. For example, at the beginning of Chapter I, John Grady, at this point still only identified as “he,” says to the cook, “I appreciate you lightin the candle,” and when she replies “Como?” (meaning “why?”) he says, “La candela. La vela.” Readers can infer from her use of “no” in one phrase and “antes” in a following one that someone else lit the candle, a “senora” who was up before her. (“Ante” is used to mean “before” in many English words. For example, an “antecedent” is a preceding event or condition.) Here is another example that is somewhat easier to decipher. In the beginning of Chapter II, when John Grady is negotiating with the manager of the hacienda to try to break the sixteen wild horses they have found in a pen, the reader understands that the Spanish words refer to the horses. The conversations before and after this brief meeting make it clear that the two young American cowboys are planning to break the horses in four days. Although readers may not know the direct translation of the Spanish, much of it is clear from the context of the surrounding English text. Keep in mind that All the Pretty Horses is set in west Texas and Mexico, so many of the characters, including John Grady, are bilingual, speaking both English and Spanish. All the Pretty Horses is written from a dual-cultural, if not multicultural, context; the language directs us to this point of view.
In addition to the Spanish terminology that may be unfamiliar to many readers, McCarthy uses cowboy terminology, especially references to specific kinds of tack (horse equipment). Names of plants and grasses of the southwest desert region are also found throughout the text. (In order to explain these phrases in more detail, a glossary is provided at the end of every Commentary section, for your reference.)
A comment on the Border Trilogy. The books of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, in order of publication, are All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. But the books are not a story in sequence and are not sequential even in theme. Rather, they are three pieces of a large puzzle, a picture of the American Southwest, specifically an area of the border with Mexico that runs from Laredo, Texas, to Tucson, Arizona. McCarthy is presenting a picture of that vast desert, grassland, and mountain region where the last of the pioneers settled.
The three books can be read in any order because each enhances the story and expands upon the themes of the others. The Crossing is in many ways parallel to All the Pretty Horses. The main character in The Crossing, Billy Parham, goes to Mexico the first time alone, to take a pregnant, injured wolf back to its home in the mountains after its mate has been killed. Parham begins this difficult task at the end of the 1930s and is away for some time. When he returns, his parents have been murdered and six horses stolen. So he leaves with his younger brother, Boyd, to return to Mexico and retrieve the horses. Billy (about 17 years old) and Boyd (almost 15 years old) travel several weeks and find the horses, but they lose most of the horses again, and Boyd is wounded on their return trip. Billy finds a kind old doctor who saves Boyd’s life, but Boyd insists on Billy going to find the young girl who had accompanied them on part of their journey in Mexico. After he is well, Boyd and the girl run away together, and Billy travels around for several months and can’t find them. So finally, he returns to the United States alone. World War II has begun, and he tries to enlist but is rejected several times for a minor heart defect. He decides to return to Mexico after finding one of their horses at a ranch; instead of finding Boyd, he finds Boyd’s grave. Billy digs up his brother’s body and brings his remains home.
In Cities of the Plain, Billy Parham and John Grady Cole (the main character in All the Pretty Horses) meet up on a New Mexican ranch not far from El Paso. The first scene of the novel shows the two men, with a third cowboy, drinking at a bar in Juarez across the border from El Paso. Billy calls John Grady the all-American cowboy. We never see the character Rawlins from All the Pretty Horses again, and at the end of Cities of the Plain, we find out that John Grady has not contacted his family around San Angelo for three years, since the end of the Pretty Horses saga.
In Cities of the Plain, McCarthy provides more stories of ranching life. John Grady rides the range checking cattle and notices a small calf that runs with a strange gait. He ropes and throws the calf, ties it up, and discovers a broken-off small piece of wood pushed into the calf’s inner leg. By pushing and finally using his teeth, he extracts the piece of wood. Meanwhile, the wound is infected, so he swabs it with antiseptic, which he carries in his saddlebag. In this scene, we learn why roping was such an important skill in the raising of cattle on the range. If John Grady hadn’t roped and treated the calf, it would have died from the infection. In this final novel in the trilogy, John Grady is still admired and known for his expertise with horses. When a wealthy man is looking for someone to train his filly so that he can give the horse to his wife for a present, the ranch owner recommends John Grady for the job. John Grady rejects the horse because it has an invisible crack in one hoof that someone has tried to cover up. He knows the horse is lame because it twitches one ear when it steps on that hoof. The men try to bribe John Grady to keep the horse but he makes them put it back in the truck and leave.
Even as an older young adult, John Grady still has an idealistic streak. He falls in love with a young girl who is different from the rest and starts to fix up a remote cabin on the ranch so that they can marry. He also has a very wild, half-ruined horse that he is determined to turn around. None of the other cowboys believes he can tame the horse, but John Grady proves them wrong.
At the end of Cities of the Plain, we find Billy Parham in his late seventies, wandering in Arizona at the end of the 1900s. The cities of this final novel in the trilogy are the border towns, El Paso and Juarez. Many scholars note the similarities to the biblical “cities of the plain” where Abraham and Lot settled, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. To be sure, in the last novel of the trilogy, more corruption is present than in the first two books.
The end is near and the image of John Grady on his horse, horse and rider appearing as one, is soon to be extinct. Man’s connection with nature, his oneness with it, is at an end.
