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?
