All the Pretty Horses


McCarthy, Cormac


Used in the Blue Valley Communication Arts classes


All the Pretty Horses is supposed to be a modern-day Western. It tells the story of 16-year-old Texas cowboy John Grady Cole. His parents’ divorce has left him without a family ranch to work (and he doesn’t want to be with either of them) so he runs away, setting out on horseback for Mexico. He is accompanied by 17-year-old Lacey and along the way they pick up a 13-year-old stranger on horseback, Jimmy Blevins. Trouble begins, including Blevins losing the horse and all his clothing, and the three boys stealing back the horse when they find it in a neighboring town. The boys separate while being tracked by angry men. John Grady and Lacey get work at a ranch and John Grady falls for the boss's teenage daughter, Alejandra. JG and Alejandra cook up a plot to meet and they have sex again for the last time. JG goes home to Texas and Alejandra is sent away to another city.

In the meantime, the Blevins boy lands in a Mexican prison and is severely beaten. JG and Lacey are thrown in prison with him and beaten and interrogated as well. Blevins is murdered by the Mexican officers and both JG and Lacey are seriously wounded by violent beatings and bloody knife fights; then they are separated. JG buys a knife from a fellow prisoner, then fights off and kills another prisoner. He is released by the Mexican prison, given some money (from Alejandra's grandmother) and told to get out.

JG and Alejandra cook up a plot to meet in a neighboring town, where they spend the night and have sex again. JG recovers his horses and goes home to Texas where he meets up with Lacey. Alejandra is sent away.

McCarthy has a distracting writing style, using minimal punctuation (no quotation marks in dialogue, long run-on sentences and absence of apostrophes) and the general sense of gloom that pervades the book. There is a lot of Spanish dialogue throughout the book with no explanation for someone who does not speak that language.

They also use stereotypical uneducated Texan and Mexican grammar and pervasively vulgar language throughout the book. It’s hard to understand what redeeming educational value the Blue Valley School District found in this book.


Examples of uneducated and vulgar language:


I’d like to of got across this thing tonight. I aint leadin my horse down that highway in the dark. What’s them lights? I’d make it Eldorado. How far is that do you reckon?....

There aint shit down there...

You’re a lyin sack of green shit. I know you aint no goddamn 16...

We aint seen the last of his skinny ass...

that little son of a bitch...

Bullshit...

ten pounds of shit in a five pound sack...

I dont know what that shit is...

look at my goddamned driver’s license...

What in the putrefied dogshit would you know?...

He’s full of shit...

You don’t know a goddamned thing...

dont make no bigger ass of yourself...

awful lot of goddamned questions...

that stringy son of a bitch...

Does a bear shit in the woods?...

I’m a goddamned buckaroo...

Get on the goddamned horse and quit assin around…

he’s gone completely dipshit...

Listen, shit-for-brains...

he don’t give a shit...

I don’t give a big rat’s ass...

Anybody can be a pendejo - that just means asshole.”

Some crazee peeple can say dat God ees here. But God ees not here.

Other scenes describe drinking, sexual encounters, and discussions about killing people:

“Roberto drank and handed off the bottle of mescal. They drank. They poured salt from a paper onto their wrists and licked it off…”

…”pulled off his boots and his clothes and walked out into the lake…he watched where she stepped from her pooled clothing so pale…and walked into the water…She put her other arm around his shoulder…Me quieres? She said. Yes, he said. He said her name. God yes, he said.
The following night she came to his bed and she came every night for nine nights running, pushing the door shut and latching it and turning in the slatted light at God knew what hour and stepping out of her clothes and sliding cool and naked against him in the narrow bunk all softness and perfume and the lushness of her black hair falling over him…Saying I dont care I dont care. Drawing blood with her teeth where he held the heel of his hand against her mouth that she not cry out…He sat on his bunk in the dark with his pillow in his two arms and he leaned his face into it and drank in her scent and tried to refashion in his mind her self and voice. He whispered half aloud the words she’d said. Tell me what to do. I’ll do anything you say…

Blevins asks JG what a Mexican said about him in Spanish: “He wanted to buy you. That’s what he wanted.”

“I was young man like you. You see. And this time I tell you I was always with these older boys because I want to learn every thing. ..they have some mescal..and there was this woman and all these boys is go out to this woman and they is have this woman. And I am the last one. And I go out to the place where is this woman and she is refuse me because she say I am too young…What does a man do? You see. I can no go back because they will all see that I dont go with this woman. Because the truth is always plain. You see. A man cannot go out to do some thing and then he go back. Why he go back? Because he change his mind? A man does not change his mind. Maybe they tell her to refuse to me. So they can laugh. They give her some money…But I dont let whores make trouble for me. When I come back there is no laughing. No one is laughing.”

“Do they ever let you out? Do you get to walk around? I dont know. What do you mean you dont know? I caint walk. How come you caint walk? Cause they (jailers) busted my feet all to hell is how come.”

“watched the small ragged figure vanish limping among the trees with his keepers….the pistol shot came from beyond the ebony trees…”

… had been blindsided with a sock full of gravel that took out two teeth in his lower jaw and his left eye was closed completely.

I know the United States. I have been there many times. You are like the jews. There is always a rich relative…The world wants to know if you have cojones…You think Americans are godless? Oh yes. Dont you?

…it occurred to him that he was going to die in this place…he was cut again across the outside of his upper arm. He was cut across his lower chest…he took hold of JG by the hair and forced his head back to cut his throat. As he did so JG brought his knife up..and sank it into the cuchillero’s heart. He sank it into his heart and snapped the handle sideways and broke the blade off in him…spurted a thin fan of bright arterial blood…Blood sloshed in (JG’s) boots…His hands were sticky with blood and blood was oozing through his fingers where he held himself….His boots left wet tracks of blood in the…yard…They put Mexican blood in me…does it mean I’m part Mexican? How much did they put? They said it was over a litre. Well a litre would make you almost a halfbreed.