This chapter is the one in which John Grady and Rawlins face their punishment. Here, the two youths spend time in jail, their adventure goes awry, and they are in greater danger than they have ever been in before. Rawlins spends time in a hospital at the prison, and John Grady is seriously wounded. What is the cause of their many problems? John Grady and Rawlins talk about this on their trip north, when they are first captured. Do they face this punishment because of a lie, as John Grady says, or because of the truth, as Rawlins says? It is, of course, a combination of factors, including bad luck. Blevins is a major part of their problems. John Grady and Rawlins helped Blevins because he was so young and without common sense. And he told the authorities who they were. A natural response to Blevins’ treatment of John Grady and Rawlins is anger. But Rawlins, who has never defended Blevins and always thought he would bring bad luck, says repeatedly that no one deserves to die like that.
Another obvious reason for their imprisonment is John Grady’s lie to Don Hector about coming from Texas alone, just the two of them. Although it is only one lie, it has terrible consequences. The lesson here should not go unheeded.
Rawlins, of course, thinks that the affair with Alejandra is what has landed them in trouble. He tells John Grady that, when the militia came for him in the night, he asked them if Rocha were awake and they laughed at him and said he’d been awake a long time.
The Romeo and Juliet parallel in this novel is quite interesting. Two young lovers have defied their parents, John Grady by running away from home and school and Alejandra by spending lots of time at the ranch. Alejandra is defying all her culture’s dictates by having an affair with a poor Americano. She is not only soiling her virtue, she is ignoring her class position. And she is the one who initiates the affair.
Some things are not reasonable, as John Grady tells Rawlins, and indeed the whole history of tragic romances tells us that this is so. Nevertheless, we wish there could be a happy ending for the two lovers.
Finally, the young men are saved from death and imprisonment because of Alejandra and her great-aunt. So, at least, the lovers escape death. But one of the protagonist’s friends dies, the one with the least common sense, just as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet where Romeo’s friend Mercutio dies.
In addition to the Romeo and Juliet motif, we see in All the Pretty Horses a Paradise Lost theme. First, there is the creation of the characters, by their families and upbringing. Then the two friends take a journey on their horses and find a paradise to live in, jobs they like, great horses to work with, a beautiful setting. They have their first taste of adulthood—no parents making decisions for them. But mistakes are made—helping Blevins, lying about knowing him, and having an affair with the forbidden girl.
John Grady says, “You dont get to go back and pick some time when the trouble started and then lay everthing off on your friend.” What John Grady is saying is that luck and fate also play their parts in the way events come to pass. We can clearly see this: If Blevins had just been satisfied to have his horse and not want to go back again to retrieve his pistol, if the great-aunt had wielded her power with more sympathy, if the father had not been so passive about his daughter and a young man he really likes, if the two boys had had papers on their own horses, all would be different.
Instead, they have to endure the horrible prison at Saltillo and learn the most terrible lessons the journey brings them. Rawlins says he never could imagine there was a place like the prison, and both of them are shocked at the inhumane way Blevins is treated. The young American cowboys are finding out about real evil, real terror, and real pain.
In Chapter III, we see much discussion of what a man is or is supposed to be. The daily fighting in the prison yard looks like madness to an outsider. But it is more than survival, it’s the way to claim manhood and territory in the prison. Only after the prisoners are severely wounded are they given any help. By this definition, you can only prove your manhood by coming close to death. To be a man is to fight.
Then there is the captain who shoots Blevins. He explains later to John Grady that men talk of honor and justice, but is that what they really want? “A man cannot go back. . . .” “A man does not change his mind.” What the captain means is that men cannot look weak or change their minds because it would look bad. Does this mean that what is proclaimed as honor is often only ego or some kind of saving face?
On the other hand, look at the idealism of the young as portrayed by John Grady and sometimes even by Rawlins. When they first meet Blevins and he is asked why they should help him, he says, “Because I’m an American.” And they stick by him, partly out of American loyalty, partly because they believe in the Golden Rule. Look where it gets them—in prison. Are the older, more cynical characters people who once were idealists, too? Has life taught them that idealism is inherently false? Remember, the old great-aunt says she was an idealist once herself.
After Rawlins and John Grady arrive in Encantada and are put in the tiny prison cell with Blevins and the old man (who doesn’t even know how long he has been there or for what crime), John Grady can still dream of horses when he sleeps. He dreams he runs among the horses, mares, and colts, all of them moving like music, without fear; “They ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.” This ability to dream of horses shows that in the middle of his terrible predicament, John Grady is still strongly attached to nature, that his basic spirit is still whole. It isn’t just his idealism and ethics that motivate John Grady; it is his whole sense of what is good on the earth that pushes him to make the decisions he does. The way of the land, nature, and the horses have all been his greatest teachers. From them he has learned that one does not abandon the weakest member of the herd, that one lives to ride and run free over the varied terrain, with the winds.
The character of Perez, the man who lives in a special hut on the prison grounds, presents another important lesson for John Grady. Perez says, “You cannot stay in this place and be independent peoples.” Later, he talks of the mind of the Anglo and says it is closed in a rare way. He thinks Anglos have an incomplete picture of the world. Perhaps he is saying they don’t comprehend cruelty. He also has a unique idea of manhood: “The world wants to know if you have cojones.” He cynically says that people who don’t have a price die. Later, he says that Americans aren’t practical and they think “there are good things and bad things.” Are we to see this Perez character as an evil force that John Grady must contend with at the lowest point of his life? Or is Perez the existential survivor who sees that John Grady lives through the terrible stabbing? Some of what Perez says makes some sense, and it may very well be true that “evil is a true thing in Mexico.” This may be one of John Grady’s lessons. However, it is clear that Perez is also always manipulating his own situation and this makes him a very slippery character, one whose mind is genuinely foreign, not just by nationality, but also temperament.
As an interesting footnote, Rawlins has received over a liter of Mexican blood, and at the end of the chapter it worries him that he might be part Mexican. John Grady teases him about being a half-breed, but has to exclaim, “Hell . . . blood’s blood.” Neither of them is very happy. They now know the effects of their actions and certain circumstances, but the full power of what has happened to them and their total fall from grace has not totally been understood.
