The Interconnection of Realism and Romanticism in All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy is an American writer whose work has captured multiple eras in a multitude of settings, demonstrating his incomparable versatility as an author. Two of these books, All the Pretty Horses and The Road, show this through the stark contrast between their tones, settings, and themes. While All the Pretty Horses focuses on deromanticizing the American ideal of the west, The Road focuses on a father-son relationship and their disagreements on how to handle life in a post-apocalyptic world.

To begin, All the Pretty Horses is set in 1950’s America, and serves to challenge the persisting and romanticized idea of the west. Often, American film and literature, specifically “Westerns” depicted the wild west, containing clichés of noble cowboys riding off into the sunset after defeating an evil adversary, guns and their beautiful lover in tow. McCarthy, however, defies these clichés by including a similar framework that, instead, shows the harsh reality of western life. The main character, Grady, is a sixteen-year-old fleeing to Mexico. He and his other young counterparts, Rawlins and Belvins (17 and 13 respectively), attempt to survive in the face of The Captain, who is cruel and unforgiving. Unlike traditional Westerns, the protagonists don’t get to win against their villains. Belvins is killed at the hands of The Captain, and the survivors are forced to live with the consequences, having seen a brutal reality far beyond what their young brain could (or should) comprehend. Their ideas of what Mexico will be are clouded by the small amount they have seen, including the Ranch and the small villages they encounter. They see Mexico as a society separate from the modern world, but that is inherently false. They lose in almost every sense, including after the main conflict when Grady has to live with the consequences of his violent actions and has to experience the death of his father. The story ends with Grady riding off into the sunset (the most cliché aspect of a classic western), but the sky is red, symbolizing the inevitable violence he faced and carried out. This concept is present in The Road as well, despite its major differences. The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic world, focusing on a father and son struggling to survive. It has a hopeless tone, and the isolated setting of the state roads they travel on enhance the sense of dismay present in the story. By the end of the story, the son is surviving, but the conditions of his destroyed world are not promising. The boy, if anything, is temporarily sustained. Even though the people who he met were good, they will inevitably face conflict when they encounter the infinite evil their world has fallen to. There is no victory, only a short renewal on a difficult life.

Furthermore, All the Pretty Horses shows an intersection between romanticism and reality in the same way The Road shows the intersection between the reality of the present and nostalgia for the past. All the Pretty Horses challenges the romanticized concept of the west while also indulging it. The Road also indulges the concept of fantasy, but instead of relying on the reader’s pre-existing assumptions, it explicitly shows the contrast between the bleak present and the man’s reflection on his childhood. The memory from the man’s childhood also serves as a contrast between the other memories the man looks back on. The others were largely negative, including a reflection on the boy’s mother’s poor reaction to his birth. For example, the mother said, “My heart ripped out the night he was born”, which can be interpreted to mean that she wishes her son could be born into a better world than the one they exist in. Though she was not a good mother and abandoned her son via her suicide, her wish for him was valid as he was forced to live in a devastated world, filled with horrors beyond what she predicted. His father, however, begged the mother not to end her life in order to maintain a degree of normalcy within their family. He wanted the best for his son, even in the face of hardship. As in The Road, the characters are against the world, as they always have been. Their hardship is not necessarily more severe than it was in the past- it just took a different form. These themes of the contrast between past and present are central to the plot of the two stories, as they show the degree to which life has changed over time for the characters.

Another theme largely present in both stories is nature and how the characters exist within it. In both novels, the characters travel through their respective desolate settings. In All the Pretty horses, they are traveling through a largely empty countryside, surrounded by bones and tumbleweeds. In The Road, however, the isolation of their setting is key to their survival. Most of the people they encounter are threats to them, so unlike All the Pretty Horses, this seclusion can be seen as a positive. For example, they encounter the “roadrat” who attempts to kill the boy. He is portrayed as almost inhuman, described with “reptilian calculation in those in those cold and shifting eyes. The gray and rotten teeth. Claggy with human flesh.”