ALL THE PRETTY HORSESCormac McCarthy

CONTEXT

Genre: American Western Influences: Louis L’amour, Zane Gray,

William Faulkner, and Earnest Hemingway. The American west has come to

represent two things:1). A sacred, promised land and 2). A desert wilderness, where danger lurks, primarily in the form of hostile Native Americans.

The result: Fear mingled with excitement

CONTEXT CONT’D

The west was a place, far away from civilization, of violence and lawlessness; a place relatively devoid of women and children, dominated by the men who settled it first, governed by their codes of strength and grit, a place of lonely and awesome beauty.

THE WESTERN MOVIE

Features: Antisocial heroes, lawless villains,

sweep of violins while a horse rides into the sunset.

Epitome of American masculinity.

THE WESTERN IN RE-WRITE

The Native Americans are not savage brutes, in Kevin Costner’s 1990 film, Dances with Wolves

The Cowboy code of violence is no longer justified in Clint Eastwood’s 1993 film Unforgiven.

In 2005, the perception of the American Cowboy was turned inside out with Brokeback Mountain.

In 1994, the movie Bad Girls depicts a group of four prostitutes who band together to travel and conquer the old west.

This is where McCarthy takes makes his entrance and changes forever the way we view the American West and the stoical cowboy archetype.

MCCARTHY’S STYLE

Unconventional Example: Although the night was cool the double doors of the grange stood open

and the man selling the tickets was seated in a chair on a raised wooden platform just within the doors so that he must lean down to each in a gesture akin to benevolence and take their coins and hand them down their tickets or pass upon the ticketstubs of those who were only returning from outside. The old adobe hall was buttressed along its outer walls with piers not all of which had been a part of its design and there were no windows and the walls were swagged and cracked. A string of electric bulbs ran the length of the hall at either side and the bulbs were covered with paper bags that had been painted and the brushstrokes showed through in the light and the reds and greens and blues were all muted and much of a piece. The floor was swept but there were pockets of seeds underfoot and drifts of straw and at the far end of the hall a small orchestra labored on a stage of grainpallets under a bandshell rigged from sheeting. Along the foot of the stage were lights set in fruitcans among colored crepe that smoldered throughout the night. The mouths of the cans were lensed with tinted cellophane and they cast upon the sheeting a shadowplay in the lights and smoke of antic demon players and a pair of goathawks arced chittering through the partial darkness overhead.

ALTERNATELY: LUSH AND SPARE

Poetic Rhythmic But then. . . . sometimes, whole scenes

are skipped: making it hard to follow. Lacking in exposition: makes it seems

as if past doesn’t matter, only present counts.

AREAS OF CONCERN

No quotation marks Sometimes names omitted making it

difficult to follow to which “he” or “she” he’s referring.

Spanish/Spanglish: Glossary available in handout section on website.

SYMBOLS, MOTIFS,THEMES

landscapes, sunsets, horses, and mountains, overall nature.

Cowboys/mythical stoic cowboy Coming of Age: the Bildungsroman Death Loss of family ties Gender roles Innate violence Moral codes