The horses in All the Pretty Horses play a critical role, which is why specific horses are listed as characters in the front of these notes. The horses are more than a means of transportation for John Grady and Rawlins; they are friends. For example, when John Grady Cole finds Redbo in a stable after his long incarceration and travels on the grullo, Redbo whinnies, or calls to him in a touching reunion. The novel is centered around the horses: catching them, riding them, breeding them, rescuing them, admiring them, talking about them, philosophizing about them. They are the core, the soul, of the novel.
But the horses mean more to John Grady and Rawlins not just because they've formed bonds with them. Horses carry with them centuries of meaning, tied to legend and myth, romance and battle. When McCarthy uses the word grail in the first chapter of the book, we connect the horses to the romance of adventure that goes back in western culture to the crusades. Ever since that medieval period when, according to legend, women gave men their scarves and waved them off to romantic undertakings, men have gone, often on their horses, to fight wars. Here, in this book, are all the same ingredients. Except instead of being the glorious legend of times past, this story is skewed, like light shining through a prism. What we see on the other side isn't the same as what came before. We have no happy ending, no glorious victory with love awaiting the victors. Not that there were, necessarily, happy endings during earlier historic times, but our notions of romance make us believe there were. McCarthy is a realistic mythmaker. His ending is not happy, but it is not totally tragic either. This is why it can be called "western existentialism." John Grady's father has come back from war injured and altered for the worse. The Mexican Revolution that affects so much of what happens in Mexico is 40-year-old history, and it stays with those who lived through it, haunting them and affecting their lives decades later. Yet romance and adventure still reverberate in the undertaking of the two young men when they take their horses and head south. The common thread is the horses.
