I was first introduced to Cormac McCarthy’s novels in college. We read All The Pretty Horses, and his writing style is a little complex at first. He does not use much punctuation, no quotation marks, or commas. A Pulitzer Prize winner can do what he wants, right? He disliked using semicolons or exclamation points. To do this in writing, an author must first understand the rules of English to know how to overcome the issues and when they can break them. 

For years, I taught All The Pretty Horses in AP Literature. Most of my students enjoyed it, although it can sometimes be violent. McCarthy said in an interview, “In classical literature, tragedy is the core of the human experience…we want to know about it and how to deal with it.” All The Pretty Horses is a trilogy (The Crossing and Cities of the Plain), but each novel can be read on its own. 

His writing is so mysterious. The characters are mysterious, too. With each sentence I feel this premonition that his words carry numerous possibilities with deep layers of meanings. John Grady, the protagonist values justice, loyalty, honesty, and courage. He is the classic hero on a journey. As he and his friend cross the river into Mexico from Texas, it is metaphorical. They are the last of their kind, cowboys with horses. The industrial revolution has already started to affect their town and the oil rigs have taken over where farmland used to be. 

“They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pasture-land. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The light fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”

Grady must grapple with questions of predetermined fate versus free will. He questions whether there is a God and what the nature of man and the universe is. Aren’t these age-old questions that many of us face?

Cormac brings to life the significance of the American Frontier and the effect it had on our forefathers. The eerie feeling when Grady rides along the trail made by the Comanches and the ghosts that still linger on that bloody path of tears. He writes:

At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses’ hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and foot-slaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives. 

The Comanches! The writing! That is one beautiful long sentence above. “Canted light like a dream” and that last line, so heartbreaking:  “…nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.” 

McCarthy chooses with care and obvious love each romantic word as he describes the land. Many critics assert that the landscape has more than a physical meaning; it’s like a metaphysical pilgrimage for the reader and for John Grady. 

The frontier is like the outer edge of a wave, the horseman is met with savagery, where civilization is left behind. This is what John Grady wanted; he wanted to ride, to work on a ranch, to work with horses. Biblical allusions appear and reappear in each chapter. The color red and blood are mingled throughout. 

John Grady is raised to believe there is still a code of honor, a Sportman’s code in which all men are loyal, honest, and brave, and that the world will bestow on him true justice for those who do not adhere to this code. This code is necessary for survival. By adhering to this code, Grady is often placed in danger, but it is this code that eventually saves him. 

How much control does man have over his life? Is the universe a place of order or chaos? 

McCarthy tries to answer these questions, and each time I read this book, I have different answers relating to each character. Our will may be free, but our outcomes or the outcomes of others are out of our hands. 

There is so much more to unpack. I will have to have a Part II of this novel. And don’t get me started on The Road…..I love that novel, too. Have you read this novel? If you love classical writing, Cormac is a great place to start.