ABSTRACT
All the Pretty Horses is the first of the sequence of novels commonly known as “e Border Trilogy.” Each of the three texts is set in the region that provided the setting for Blood Meridian; the trilogy may be read as a comment on the twentieth century consequences of those nineteenth century events, of the failure of modernity to take root in Mexico and of the deeply troubling consequences of its all too profound success in the United States. All three texts depict young American men crossing the border from a modern American present that cannot provide the satisfactions they desire, to a Mexico of an imagined past in which they hope that they will be able to fulfill the mythic roles by which their culture has structured their sense of identity. Octavio Paz writes:
In general, Americans have not looked for Mexico in Mexico; they have looked for their obsessions, enthusiasms, phobias, hopes, interests-and these are what they have found. In short the history of our relationship is the history of a stubborn deceit, usually involuntary though not always so.¹
is is, of course, a continuation of the mythoclastic project that I suggest unifies all McCarthy’s work. e domestication of the wilderness was an aspect of the nineteenth century version of America’s exceptionalist mythology and the cowboy became its romantic hero. John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, cowboys in the 1940s and ’50s, learn the bitter lesson that modern America has become a waste land that has no place for either cowboys or heroes and whose Faustian pursuit of ultimate knowledge has presented man with the means of his own destruction.
