Character Analysis: All The Pretty Horses

Scott Kim
10/10/15
Period 7
Claps
All the Pretty Horses Q3 Prompt A

The story All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy guides readers from central United States to territories of Mexico. Throughout John Grady’s growth, from young and confused child to a mature, wise adult. In the process, the readers see major conflict McCarthy presents, which is John Grady’s response to justice or injustice in a corrupt society around him. Though John Grady’s surroundings are corrupt in All the Pretty Horses and he faces disappointments, he trusts in the fact that good will triumph over evil will make him able to maintain his moral in corrupt society, but only through limited scope of his conflicts not on scope of other characters.
John Grady believes

there is a justice everywhere. He believes in justice where good people deserve good, and bad people should be punished.

One of the place where his belief is apparent is when Blevins is executed. Blevins get executed with no trial or discussion of right or wrong at all. John Grady gets upset because he found out Blevins died without any fair trial. To John Grady, Blevins’ execution without a trial shows that the society is corrupt because John believed Blevins deserved good. So when Blevins died without deserving his good, the trial, he sees the world as a corrupt place. However, John Grady’s trust is not shattered as he thinks it is. John Grady does not know, but Blevins is actually corrupt inside because he lied to Grady about his entire identity. Though John Grady does not realize this and believes his ideal justice has been shattered, his ideal justice is actually not shattered because Blevins is

fairly punished for his act of lying with no trial. In this particular scene, readers can see that John Grady is not yet mature enough to clearly distinguish between justice and in justice. In his own trial, on the other hand, he put trust on the judge that the judge will believe his story because he is a good person who deserves good things. Because he is true on what he says to the judge, John Grady does win the trial and earn his horse. This is when he finally confirms that justice do exists. Though John Grady is able to confirm his ideal justice, the fact that good people will always deserve good things and vice versa, exists in the world, he is not able to fully determine who really is corrupt or not in the society.
John Grady was able to find some degree of justice in the world, but not to the extent where everything fell under John Grady’s idealism.

Although he had a fair travel, he was never able to find the true owner of the horse. Winning a trial and gaining the horse back in the end serves to show there is a justice in the corrupt society and thus able for John Grady to maintain his moral. Not being able to find the true owner of the horse, on the other hand, shows some degree of failure in his ideal justice because he was only able to find his justice only through his, not any others. The owner of the horse, who we don’t know if he or she was corrupt, never gained his or her horse back. Based on John Grady’s ideal justice, readers assume that the owner must be corrupt because he or she never received the horse back as a punishment. Though there is an element of justice where John Grady was able to find one case of ideal justice, it was overall a failure because he was not able to fully see his justice appeared on anybody

else.
John Grady was able to maintain his moral in a corrupt society because he was able to find some justice he was looking for through his own experience at the trial. He saw good’s triumph over evil, but only through his own trial, not through others. Though John Grady did mature in the end, responding to corruption and determining the justice inside it, but not to the point where he is able to fully observe his ideal justice being applied to others. In his mind, his ideal justice has appeared on the world throughout his journey, but his idea of justice does not apply to everyone.