All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy - Essay Example

Here Grady is more experienced with the cruelties and whims of life. His innocence and ignorance push him to do things at the risks of his life. Gail Moore Morrison portrays him as a man who “will risk much, for he is a man of action, of passion, of character and of honor” (184). Being pushed by his innocence he runs away to Mexico in quest of unnamed fulfillment. This unnamed fulfillment is more than the promise of adventure. In Grady’s case, it is the annihilation of the pain of ignorance.

For the sixteen years old boy, his innocence changes into experience and consequently his adventure turns into struggle for life. In a world, full of struggles, Blevins’ death prove that a boy of broiling blood like Blevins must die unless he receives supervisions a realist like Rawlings. As the romanticism of the adventure begins to dispel, Cole starts to realize that a life-supporting job, as Cole takes the job of a wrangler in Mexico, is a must to survive amid the whims of life. In this regard, Seth M Packham comments on the change of the protagonist, “His heroism, and stubbornness to the cowboy code of chivalry are severely circumscribed by the evils of hostile Mexico” (14).

In the novel stern realities and unexpected truth appear with their naked faces. The novel is fraught with the theme that the precondition of experience necessarily demands the interactions between human beings and the evil presences of this universe. In his journey to the region of the unknown Grady Cole confronts the evil that appears to be the inevitable component of the world in which human beings live, as Walter Sullivan comments, “In McCarthys novels evil is too endemic to require motivation” (651).

The paradox of innocence and experience in the novel is that Grady Cole has to interact and at the same time be acquainted with the evil in the world and the evil within himself in order to