All The Pretty Horses

The Border Trilogy comprises three McCarthy novels: All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities on the Plain (1998). Each of these novels concerns the life of young men as they live and work on both sides of the US-Mexico border during the 1940s and 1950s, a time when traditional ranching was becoming an outmoded way of life. All the Pretty Horses sets up common elements that recur throughout the three novels: the power of male bonds; a love and appreciation for the vaquero lifestyle; characters who have a naïve sense of justice encountering a bleak, nihilistic world; and the inherent tragedy of human connection. Notably, The Crossing was billed as a follow-up to All the Pretty Horses but features a different protagonist, Billy Parham, who travels to Mexico to release a captured wolf and ends up on a journey that costs him his entire family, including his brother Boyd. Billy and John Grady are the dual protagonists of Cities on the Plain, which features themes and character arcs that reverberate with the earlier novels: John Grady falls into trouble over a woman again but has the loyalty of a friend to rely on, and Billy tries to pragmatically save John Grady as he previously sought to save his brother; Billy sees John Grady as a romantic who cannot accept the way the world is.

The two novels that follow All the Pretty Horses are far bleaker in their depiction of the world; Cities of the Plain ends with John Grady dead and Billy a broken man. All the Pretty Horses is an outlier in the trilogy and in McCarthy’s career as a whole: It’s his only romance, the main characters are talkative and witty, and it’s far more hopeful than the works that came before and after. All the Pretty Horses was particularly notable for its stark contrast to the relentless violence of McCarthy’s previous novel, Blood Meridian (1985), which posits that humanity itself is apocalyptic in nature. John Grady is shaken by what he experiences, but his sense of justice and moral goodness in the world remains intact, and he’s still a romantic by the end of the novel. While this appears like a hopeful continuity of character in response to a bleak world, these qualities also lead to John Grady’s death in the final Border Trilogy novel. In McCarthy’s stories, characters either become disillusioned or they die clinging to their beliefs. McCarthy leaves which is the worse fate ambiguous.