American Literature Themes

There are two American literature themes that I think are quite relevant to “All the Pretty Horses.”

First, the theme of innocence to awareness can be seen everywhere in American literature, including in this book. As I have discussed before, this book is a coming-to-age story. John Grady starts out knowing nothing about life but wanting to know more. You could easily say he was “innocent” at the beginning of the story. Throughout his journey, he encounters love, violence, and death. These encounters force him to grow up at the age of sixteen. He left home a boy, but he returns a man. Using the same quote before, Grady even realizes his loss of innocence when he says, “It was good 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). He didn’t know all the horrible things life could give him before he set out, but now he does. In the end of the book, John Grady Cole is a completely different person from the beginning. This idea of taking on a journey in which a person grows up and loses their innocence is very common in American Literature.

Another common theme in American Literature is the hero. In American Literature the “evil” this hero often fights is not typically a person or a thing; it is society as a whole. In “All the Pretty Horses” we can see this on an even larger scale: Individual vs. World. In the book, Grady fights the limitations, cruelty, and prejudice the world puts on him. He cannot have the one girl he loves. He is looked down upon for being a poor young boy. And lastly, he is treated very cruelly throughout the book, despite his tender age. He fights for his life, and it is against society that he is fighting. However, Grady seems to put himself against the world- and life itself- rather than society. “He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls” (256). To him, he isn’t fighting anything, but merely finding the truths of life. If it were society he was fighting, it could be changed. But you can’t change the way life is, at least in Grady’s eyes. And because this is how Grady views it, he is a tragic hero.