When characters are forced to confront the vagaries and consummate powers of nature, they are galvanized by an elegiac yen to repeat the entrenched patterns and plots of the past. The present is essentially an illimitable process of repetition. In All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, as John Grady Cole gradually starts to realize the frailty and hypocrisy of his life, he attempts to return to the imagined innocence of the consecrated cowboy of the mythic past, only to find out that such a return is unfeasible.
John Grady’s life on his family’s Texas ranch is a romantic fiction, a façade barely concealing the falseness at its core. From the outset, John Grady is an idealist who believes in an imagined code of justice and honor in a universe founded upon iniquity and immorality. Like the peasants in Alfonsa’s parable who try to sell things no one wants, John Grady embraces the values of a myth that obscures the true nature of the world. He does not realize that the falsity of the sacrosanct cowboy is tantamount to the broken pieces of machinery the peasants collect from the roads. The peasants’ belief in a myth (that all things of the industrialized world have value) yoked with an abysmal ignorance of the true nature of that world both fortifies them and dooms them. Duena Alfonsa advises our protagonist to view the world sans ignorance and sentiments, however alluring they may be. What John Grady and Rawlins encounter in Mexico is similar to what they left behind in Texas – cowboys, horses and grullos, ranches and haciendas. Mexico illumines the phoniness of the American myth. Like the young Alfonsa, Alejandra and John Grady both view the world through a rosy filter, from the privileged stations of their social status, insulated in their ranches where the descendants of the people their ancestors conquered and whose land they purloined are now servants and pariahs. Alejandra and John Grady are like the peasants of the countryside who cling to bolts and “wornout part[s] of a machine that no one could even know the use of” (McCarthy 231). In their fragile paradises, neither of them realizes that what may appear innocuous or true may be unsound and defective; an illusion. Alejandra ultimately recognizes the futility of refusing to choose “between the dream and the reality.”
After his odyssey in Mexico and his conversations with Duena Alfonsa, John Grady concludes that the individual is alone in a callous world. He must forsake his blind belief in a mythic construct that conceals the true nature of the universe as well as the knowledge of his rightful place in it. By the end of All the Pretty Horses, John Grady starts to see the inanity of the myths into which he has poured his faith, as he becomes imprisoned after the knife fight and feels a child’s anguish surfacing within him “but it brought with it such pain that he stopped it cold and began at once his new life and the living of it breath to breath” (203). Duena Alfonsa tells John Grady that to discern what is true from what is convenient to believe is to abandon all the myths of one’s culture, and to lead a solitary life, countering hopeless bitterness with courage.
