All The Pretty Horses

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 219-241 Summary

John Grady hitches rides to San Buenaventura, noting the kindness and companionship he’s given along the way by refugee workers and impoverished Mexicans. He makes his way back to La Purísima from there. Seven weeks have passed, and people are hesitant to invite him in until Antonio comes out. Don Héctor and Alejandra are gone. John Grady returns to his room in the barn, then goes to the house, where Maria the cook feeds him and tells him that Dueña Alfonsa will see him that evening. John Grady rides the racing stallion through the countryside all day, then talks to the vaqueros who are glad to see him but happy that Rawlins has gone home, as “a man leaves much when he leaves his own country” (226).

Dueña Alfonsa is not surprised that John Grady returned. She reveals that the officers came once before they arrested John Grady and Rawlins, and Héctor said he would investigate personally before turning the boys over, sure that they were innocent. Dueña Alfonsa confirms that she intervened on Alejandra’s behalf after their arrest and that Alejandra agreed to never see him again. John Grady says “You didnt have the right. You should of left me there” (229). Dueña Alfonsa reveals that she advocated for him throughout, despite the appearance otherwise.

Dueña Alfonsa tells a story her father used to tell of a man who mints coins. In her father’s view, the coiner is the one who decides all fate by placing the metal in the cast one way or the other. A coin toss is the result of his initial decision. Fate can be reckoned with, but the “coiner cannot.”

She tells John Grady of her childhood. She grew up watching how poverty hardened the nation’s children. She was an avid reader and free thinker who was friends with the historical Francisco and Gustavo Madero’s family. Francisco and Gustavo were idealists, and Dueña Alfonsa believed more people were as well, which she learned over time wasn’t true.

When she lost fingers in a hunting accident, Dueña Alfonsa believed her life was ended, since a woman with a “disfigurement” was not a marriage prospect. But Gustavo, who had a glass eye, came to see her. He waited all night for her to agree to the meeting. When she finally saw him, he treated her with kindness and told her of his injury and his life. He taught her that “If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune” (235).

After a pause, she relates the rest of the bloody story of the Mexican Revolution, Francisco’s Madero’s election, and the coup that led to the murder and desecration of Gustavo’s body. During this time, she was sent to Europe by her father and forbidden from associating with the Madero family. She tells John Grady that grief is a unifying bond and that history is an experiment without a control group. What bothers her most now is how cruel she was to her father during this time, especially now that he is long gone.

All of this is meant to show John Grady why she wants Alejandra to make a good life for herself and that John Grady cannot provide that for her. He tells her she hasn’t let him argue his own side. She has no sympathy for his case, which is that “certain things happened over which you had no control” (241). She sees this as more evidence of his unfitness. She gives him permission to see Alejandra again, believing that Alejandra will keep her word regardless.

Pages 241-255 Summary

In the morning, John Grady saddles up the grullo that Rawlins picked out for him and says goodbye. He’s given food and another envelope of money via Maria the cook, presumably from Dueña Alfonsa. On his ride, he meets a group of children and tells them his story, treating Blevins like a figure from a fable. They offer solutions for how to get Alejandra back, but none of them are possible.

He checks into a hotel in Torreón and calls Alejandra; she agrees to meet him in Zacatecas for the day before she is supposed to go back to La Purísima. He travels there and waits for her at the train station.

She arrives, more beautiful than ever in John Grady’s opinion, and they go to dinner together. He tells her everything that’s happened and she weeps, saying “Do I know what sort of man you are? What sort my father is? […] What are men?” (249). She confesses that she told her father about their affair after Dueña Alfonsa attempted to extort her. This happened while John Grady and Rawlins were out riding, just before their arrest. Don Héctor rode out that morning intending to kill John Grady, but she believes he did not because he was fearful that Alejandra would harm herself. She says that she “didnt know [Don Héctor] would stop loving me. I didnt know he could. Now I know” (252).

They spend the night together, and John Grady asks Alejandra to marry him. In the morning, she says she had a dream about his death. They spend the day in Zacatecas, and she shows him the place where her grandfather died fighting for Madero’s cause. They go back to the hotel and have sex, and she tells him that she cannot marry him. He takes her to the train and sees her off, seeing very clearly that “all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all” (254). After she leaves, he gets drunk, starts a fight, and wakes in a room he doesn’t recognize.

Pages 255-284 Summary

John Grady returns to Torreón and buys a gun. He travels to a crossroads that points to Encantada and decides he “aint leaving [his] horse down here” (257). He travels back to the captain’s office and waits for him. When the captain arrives, John Grady takes him hostage and demands to know where his horse Redbo is. The captain claims not to know, but John Grady insists and frees Orlando, the old prisoner he shared a cell with. He and the captain head out with John Grady pretending to be handcuffed and go to a charro’s (horseman’s) house where Rawlins’s horse is kept. When the charro hesitates, John Grady puts the gun to the captain’s head. Together, they all go to a man named Don Rafael’s house, where the other horses are kept. They see Redbo and Blevins’s horse in the barn, but a man sneaks up on them and waits for them to exit. John Grady handcuffs the captain, ties him to Blevins’s horse, and sends it out, watching where the horse looks to reveal the location of the hidden man. In this way, he surprises and disarms him, but John Grady is still shot in the leg by an unseen man from a distance. This spooks Blevins’s horse, which charges and falls. John Grady throws himself on the horse to keep it down, finds the shooter, and returns fire. The shooter flees into a shed.

Holding his other attacker hostage, John Grady has the charro gather the horses; the captain’s shoulder is dislocated from being tied to Blevins’s horse. John Grady is confident that the charro will cooperate because he senses hostility between the charro and the captain and the charro “could not have brought himself to [care for horses] wrong” (263). He and the captain both get on Redbo so that John Grady won’t be shot as they leave. They ride out into the country toward Encantada.

Riders follow them, and John Grady fires on them to get them to scatter. They continue, and John Grady knows they will find him eventually. He stops and rides back into an arroyo, where he uses rocks, string, and a cigarette to set up the captain’s pistol to fire once the cigarette burns down. He leaves the grullo horse behind, asking forgiveness, as there are too many horses to manage with his wounded leg. They ride out over a mesa, and John Grady hears the pistol shot, which he thinks will draw the riders away.

Night falls, and they make camp. John Grady unloads his rifle and takes his pistol apart, sticking the barrel into the fire. When it’s red hot, he uses it to cauterize his bullet wound. While he’s in the shock of pain, the captain takes the unloaded rifle and threatens John Grady, but he snatches it away. In that moment, he knows he would have killed the captain if the rifle had been loaded.

They ride through the night and into the next day with the captain complaining that he can’t go on. They stop, and John Grady resets the captain’s dislocated shoulder. Later in the evening, John Grady spots riders again. They make camp in a deep ravine, and John Grady falls asleep.

When he wakes, three armed men stand over him. They tell him they are “Hombres del pais” (Men of the country), give him a blanket, and take the captain with them (283). He never sees them again. Alone, he makes the journey back to Texas with the three horses, stopping in Los Picos to buy supplies and observing a young couple at their wedding ceremony, reflecting that “God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all” (284).

Pages 285-302 Summary

John Grady rides into Langtry, Texas, where he learns that it’s Thanksgiving Day. For weeks, he travels around the Texas border looking for the true owner of Blevins’s horse, with no luck. In Ozona, three men claim ownership, and John Grady is asked to testify before a judge. The judge is moved to believe him but asks to see his bullet wounds. When John Grady reveals he treated them himself with a hot pistol barrel, the judge grants John Grady ownership of the horse, saying “I’ve heard a lot of things that give me grave doubts about the human race but this aint one of em” (289).

That evening, John Grady goes to see the judge at his home. What the judge said bothered him because he doesn’t agree. He feels that he disrespected Don Héctor and Alejandra, and he particularly regrets the boy he killed in prison. The judge tells him he still thinks of a boy he sent to the electric chair, even though it was appropriate. John Grady says one more thing is bothering him: The only reason he can determine why he wanted to kill the captain is that “I stood there and let him walk [Blevins] out in the trees and shoot him and I never said nothin” (293). The judge tries to comfort him, and John Grady says he still needs to find the true owner of Blevins’s horse.

The next Sunday, John Grady hears the Jimmy Blevins Gospel Hour on the radio, so he rides up to Del Rio where it’s broadcast. Pastor Jimmy Blevins and his wife have him for dinner, but they don’t know the horse or anything about John Grady’s Blevins. The pastor is more interested in explaining why the radio is a powerful tool for God, and his wife expresses concern for how much people ask of her husband’s faith and professed healing abilities.

John Grady never finds the horse’s owner. He rides back to San Angelo in the spring and visits Rawlins, who is glad to see him. He confirms John Grady’s suspicion that his father is dead and tells him that Abuela (the Mexican woman who helped raise him) is dying. Rawlins asks John Grady to stay, but he says, “it aint my country” (299). John Grady watches Abuela’s funeral from a distance, then he rides West, past oil pumps and Indigenous people who regard him without curiosity.

Part 4 Analysis

John Grady’s return to La Purísima is his attempt to reshape the narrative around his ideals of true love and justice, but there is a disconnect between his position and Alejandra’s: He’s alone and looking for connection in the world, and she has everything to lose in pursuing him further. His conversation with Dueña Alfonsa confirms all of his suspicions, but he still clings to his Belief in Virtue in a Compromised World. Dueña Alfonsa knows better: She has spent a lifetime feeling the repercussions of the loss of Gustavo and the strained relationship she had with her father, and, though her youthful experiences make her sympathetic to John Grady, she knows whose world she lives in.

The idea of national identity—and the difference between the US and Mexico—continues to inform the novel’s plot as John Grady still fails to see how his ideals don’t correlate to those of the people around him. He is, ultimately, an outsider, even to the woman he loves. Tragically, that’s also true of his return to America: His father has died, soon followed by the woman who helped raise him, leaving him disconnected from his original home as well as his adopted one.

The Mexico of Dueña Alfonsa and the captain isn’t the only Mexico of the novel: Many of the people John Grady encounters in Part 4—including the ranch workers, the people who give him rides, the children, and the hombres de pais who take the captain—show him outright kindness and charity, even at their own expense. All of these people are rural or working class, setting up a stark contrast between the powerful or affluent Mexicans who crave authoritarianism and the common people who are more like John Grady than he’s able to recognize. The charro also embodies the tension between the ruling class and the common people, as he willingly helps John Grady recover his horses and take the captain away.

John Grady is led to despondence by Alejandra’s rejection, which is built around a central question that the novel has been quietly leading toward: “What are men?” (249). For Alejandra, it’s a cry of lament, as she’s realized how petty, controlling, and cruel her father can be (and suspects John Grady is capable of the same, particularly after his experiences). For McCarthy, it’s a question at the core of the entire Border Trilogy: In a world that’s rapidly changing, what does it mean to be a man of principle? There’s no easy answer offered in All the Pretty Horses (or in the other novels). John Grady ends up bent but not broken by his experience, but he’s also compromised who he is in key ways: He’s killed to protect himself, and he’s almost killed out of a desire for extralegal vengeance (the very thing that he despised so much in the captain). His whole quest to recover the horses can be viewed as a response to Alejandra’s question: If this is what men are, John Grady will be a man. He finds it’s no help for how he feels, even though a kind of justice has been accomplished.

Back in America, John Grady’s goal becomes finding some kind of absolution or rationale for what happened. This takes the shape of his desire to reunite Blevins’s horse with its rightful owner. It’s telling that he visits a judge and a pastor in his travels, neither of whom are able to ease his burden, indicating that neither law nor religion can assuage John Grady’s personal dilemma. The pastor in particular is revealed to be a self-interested charlatan, suggesting that powerful figures in America have much in common with those in Mexico. In his travels, John Grady has grown from an idealistic teenager to a hardened adult who no longer feels he has access to the world’s comforts. The novel ends as it begins, with John Grady riding west into wilderness, cut off from the people and places of his past and unsure of his place in the world.