Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933 and spent most of
his childhood near Knoxville, Tennessee. He served in the U.S. Air
Force and later studied at the University of Tennessee. In 1976 he
moved to El Paso, Texas, where he lives today. McCarthy''s fiction
parallels his movement from the Southeast to the West--the first
four novels being set in Tennessee, the last three in the Southwest
and Mexico.
The Orchard Keeper (1965) won the
Faulkner Award for a first novel; it was followed by
Outer
Dark (1968),
Child of God (1973),
Suttree (1979),
Blood Meridian
(1985), and
All the Pretty Horses, which won both
the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award
for fiction in 1992.
1. All the Pretty Horses opens with one
death--that of John Grady''sgrandfather--and ends with the death of
the family servant called Abuela,"grandmother." (At the novel''s
end, John Grady also learns that his father has died.) How do these
deaths impel the novel''s plot? What larger meanings do they
suggest?
2. What other events in this novel occur more than once? How
does McCarthy use repetition as a structuring device?
3. How does the author establish John Grady''s character? How
has he changed by the novel''s end? At what points in the book do
we see him change?
4. What attributes does McCarthy seem to value in his
characters, and how can you tell he does so? Do these traits always
serve them well, or are the boys in All the Pretty
Horses victims of their own virtues?
5. On the hacienda an old man named Luis tells the boys that
"the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it
out of all horses and makes it mortal...that if a person understood
the soul of a horse then he would understand all the horses that
ever were" (p. 111). "Among men," Luis continues, "there was no
such communion as among horses and the notion that men could be
understood at all was probably an illusion." How are these
statements borne out or contradicted within the novel? To what
extent does the author allow us to "understand" his horses, while
keeping his human characters psychologically opaque? What sort of
contrasts does McCarthy draw between the communal soul of horses
(see especially pages 103-107) and the profound solitude of men?
What role, generally, do horses play in this book?
6. On page 89 Rawlins says: "A goodlookin horse is like a
goodlookin woman...They''re always more trouble than what they''re
worth." How does this statement foreshadow events to come? Where
else in the novel do casual statements serve as portents?
7. How does the author establish the differences between the
United States and Mexico? How do their respective inhabitants seem
to view each other?
8. Alejandra''s aunt offers two alternative metaphors for the
workings of destiny, comparing it both to a coiner in the moment he
places a slug in the die and to a puppet show in which the strings
are always held by other puppets (pages 230-231). Which of these
metaphors seems more apt to the narrative as a whole? Is what
happens to the boys in the course of the novel the result of
character or fate?
9. Do the boys'' journey and subsequent ordeals ever seem
foolish, futile, or anachronistic? If so, how does McCarthy suggest
this?
10. All the Pretty Horses is spare in
exposition (note the economy with which McCarthy establishes John
Grady''s situation at the book''s beginning) yet lavish in the
attention it devotes to scenes and details whose significance is
not immediately clear (note the description of the cantina on page
49 and the scene in which John Grady and Rawlins buy new clothes on
pages 117-121). Why do you think the author has chosen to weight
his narrative in this way?
11. Although John Grady and Rawlins are innocent of stealing
horses, McCarthy suggests that they are culpable of other crimes.
At different points in the book he compares them to "young thieves
in a glowing orchard" (p. 31) and "a party of marauders" (p. 45).
When John Grady makes love to Alejandra, we are told that it is
"sweeter for the larceny of time and flesh" (p. 141). What kinds of
theft might McCarthy be writing about? Might the boys'' suffering
be seen as warranted by earlier transgressions? What sort of moral
system applies within the universe of this book?
12. Is All the Pretty Horses a violent book?
How do the novel''s characters feel about the deaths they cause? At
a time when graphic and gratuitous descriptions of mayhem are
standard in much popular fiction for purposes of mere shock and
titillation, does McCarthy succeed in restoring to violence its
ancient qualities of pity and terror? How does he accomplish
this?
13. What role does history play in McCarthy''s narrative? To
what extent are his characters products of a particular era?
14. Although the occurrences in All the Pretty
Horses are, strictly speaking, plausible and its human
voices, in particular, are nothing if not realistic, the book also
contains a strong mythic component. How, and where, does McCarthy
introduce this? What specific myths and fairy tales does the book
suggest?