The final chapter is the unraveling and unwinding of all that has come before. It begins with the outcast theme, as John Grady, injured but healing, makes his way back to La Purisima. It contains the greatest disillusionment of the novel, when Alejandra rejects John Grady and leaves him forever. And it continues to answer the cause and effect questions—this most clearly seen in the meeting between John Grady and Alejandra’s great-aunt.
John Grady is portrayed as the wanderer, wandering with some purpose until the very last page when he sets out with Redbo and the big bay to become only a silhouette on the horizon. Until this moment, he has ridden with purpose—to try to find Alejandra, to retrieve his horses, to find the owner of the big bay. But at the end of the novel, he joins those who wander forever.
Mexico has let down John Grady. It is a land of cruelties he had not imagined when he first came upon its beauty. The great-aunt is rigid in her adherence to reason. She has no sympathy for the young, the idealist (even if she thinks she once was one herself), the romantic. And Alejandra is too educated and tied to her society to run away with John Grady. She even refers to herself as a whore because of the affair she had with John Grady, clearly unable to reconcile the passion she felt toward John Grady with the role she has been groomed to play.
So all of John Grady’s Mexican adventures have resulted in him being an outcast again. Was it not enough that John Grady was cast out from his own family ranch after his grandfather’s death? Now he has to endure leaving another beloved landscape. He takes the stallion on a day’s ride across the property, just as he had taken a last ride with Redbo on the Texas ranch. But here, in Chapter IV, the images are even more onerous: the dead colt being eaten by buzzards, the cabin that has some kind of spooky spirit that bothers the horse (“There was a strange air to the place. As of some site where life had not succeeded.”). Is John Grady’s destiny to fail as those before him failed?
But although sadness and loss pervade this chapter, goodwill is also a strong force We see that goodwill in the children who share lunch with John Grady and try to advise him on how to win Alejandra back; in the country peasants who take the captain away from John Grady but leave John Grady with his horses and even give him a blanket, taking pity on his plight and blessing him with their kindness; in the many people who feed John Grady; in the judge who believes him and lets him keep the bay horse; and in the Reverend Jimmy Blevins and his wife, who feed him a huge meal. These people, all of whom are strangers, offer advice and help to John Grady.
The person from whom John Grady learns the most is the judge. Forthcoming with wisdom and advice, he tells John Grady that he is being too hard on himself. The judge points out that the prisoner John Grady killed was not a good person and reminds him that the captain was not a peace officer at all. The judge is trying to teach John Grady that there really are, after all, good men and bad men in this world, and we must be able to distinguish between the two.
Disillusion is a major theme in Chapter IV. Rawlins is going home, but neither he nor John Grady is happy. When Alejandra leaves John Grady in Zacatecas, there is more than disillusion; there is a sense of foreboding and doom. Thus, when John Grady makes it back to San Angelo with the three American horses, it is a testament to his strength of will. Sheer willpower brings John Grady back to Texas to his friend Rawlins, whom he has never wanted to let down. One of John Grady’s best qualities is loyalty, and he demonstrates this to the end. John Grady also demonstrates his honesty; it is because he believes in honesty and truth that he travels for three months in the border region searching for the original owner of Blevins’ big bay. The one inconsistency in John Grady’s character is the lie he tells to Rocha when he says he doesn’t know Blevins. The fact that such an honest and honorable person could be lowered to this level serves as a warning to all of us of what can happen if we ignore our sense of right and wrong.
In the end, having traveled and learned lessons he could not have anticipated, John Grady is alone to face the death and funeral of Abuela, the old grandmother who raised him. The novel comes full circle, from the grandfather’s death in the beginning to the death of his Mexican caretaker. And both the ranches, Texan and Mexican, offer no future for John Grady. So he sets out to travel west, to New Mexico, perhaps in search of another ranch—a bittersweet ending to a wonderful adventure.
The last scene of All the Pretty Horses, in which John Grady rides into the red sunset, is what can be referred to as western existentialism. The myth of the cowboy in the west is present, but the image is demythologized. To visualize the scene is to see that classic scene from Gone with the Wind of the riders and stragglers walking across the hill in silhouette against the sky. Scarlett does return to Tara (which is similar to the Latin word “terra,” meaning earth, signifying her connection to her family’s land) and she does survive, but she loses her Rhett. John Grady loses Alejandra, so there is a parallel there as well. Scarlett’s great passion is the land and running the plantation to make money so she will never starve again. John Grady’s passion is horses and wanting to have a ranch. Because the land is often so barren in the western border region, few admit to loving that land the way Scarlett loved her beautiful Tara, but in Cities of the Plain, John Grady and another cowboy have a discussion in which they admit they find this land very satisfying. Yet it is the work and love of horses, and ranching with them, that drives John Grady. He loves his friends with great loyalty, just as Scarlett cares for her family, but essentially it is the landscape they are both tied to, even if the connections to that landscape have differing sources. John Grady cannot be attached to his family ranch, because it is irretrievably lost, so he moves on in the quest for “the” ranch.
The silhouette on the horizon is a modern image, perhaps first used in the movie Gone with the Wind, and now come to represent the modern dilemma of displaced people. The other movie that has used that image with great power is Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, in which the characters are dancing in silhouette at the end, after death has taken them all, except for the artist, wife, and baby. Strong parallels exist between this movie and All the Pretty Horses: the longing for home, and the knight who has been on an arduous quest, only to return and have to play chess with Death on a regular basis. John Grady’s quest is not over at the end of All the Pretty Horses and he will continue to search for a home, but he has certainly been playing chess with Death. He survives for now, but when will he be checkmated?
John Grady— a lover of horses, passionate, rash, strong, stubborn, and, for now, a survivor — joins a long line of memorable characters.
McCarthy adds a great touch to the final scene, just before we see the last of John Grady. He passes some Indians camped on the western plains.
The indians stood watching him. He could see that none of them spoke among themselves or commented on his riding there nor did they raise a hand in greeting or call out to him. They had no curiosity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.
The key phrases here are “he was passing” and “he would vanish.” What McCarthy is concluding is that all of us are just passing along, both on and in the landscape, and we all will vanish. The point of the novel is not the myth, or the heroics, or even the survival. Perhaps, like the knight of faith, John Grady does go out each day to fend off evil and try to do good. But in the end he is just passing by.
The final words of the novel — “. . . horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come. . . .” — remind us of Katherine Anne Porter’s story of death, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” The horse and rider are becoming pale or transparent, like a photo dissolving. The land is “darkening,” signaling not just the end of the day, but the end of the dreams, the end of the old way of life, and, ultimately, death.
We know the novel has circled back to San Angelo from the grandfather’s funeral to Abuela’s funeral. Will John Grady be like all the great uncles who never died in bed or on their own ranch? Or will he find a ranch and turn out more like the man he was named after? A certain sense of doom lingers here at the end. The reader can choose to leave the story with a sense of hope, because of John Grady’s ability to survive. Or the reader can take the signs of fading and darkness to mean John Grady is destined to fade into darkness as well.
