Colors in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses

He loved the horse's red eyes and he eyed the red butt of a cigarette that falls into the red eye of the fire and he felt the red wind that brushed his face as he rode into the world to come and the red scars from the pains of his past and he watched the small red taillights from the truck of kind men that receded and he loved the red in the eyes of the horse that carried him to the blue world ahead and the red in his blood and in his eyes that was the same but would never be the same again.

Cornac McCarthy's novel, All the Pretty Horses, questions the essence of existence through the eyes of a young man. The boy's name is John Grady Cole. McCarthy raises Grady from dreamer to defeated man within the short span of two years. The harsh reality that Grady is struck with offers the only answer to the question of existence, and that is that there is no answer. There is no answer to why we live, only many pains and many joys that have no meaning or truth.

The recurrent imagery of colors and how Grady perceives them to exist in and paint life and man's soul is one of the novel's themes. Grady experiences the best and worst that life has to offer, and he can't decide which is stronger, more real, more true. The beauty of the color red is in its warmth, the color of a desert sunset, heat of the sun, the heat of blood that circulates in horse and man. Yet the same red that colors the sky and lifeline of horse and man can stain his hands with the blood of another man. The same red sun that warms can also numb the land in an instant, chill the air to a "blue twilight" when it turns its back.

The blue twilight is cold; it exists when there is no sun. But blue is also the color she wore and it was the color of Alejandra's Mexican eyes. She was the most beautiful thing he knew, and she wore blue. Through the course of the novel, and through McCarthy's use of colors and the binaries they represent, Grady (and the reader) discovers that passion cannot exist without pain. Good cannot exist without evil; red without blue. They are interchangeable or are they the same, and they tear him apart.

Grady is introduced as a passionate young man with a spirit for horses and living his life strongly, with conviction, for what he believes to be true and honest and right. "What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them" (6). When he sets on his journey to Mexico, red is introduced as the symbol of spirit, of living, of passion. His flee to Mexico is a search for meaning and direction; he wanted to experience the world, to feel it, to see and know it. "All his reverence and all his fondness and all the learnings of his life were for the ardent hearted and that would always be so and never be otherwise" (6). That he did. But it wasn't all roses.

The small, Texas town he once called home offered nothing resembling passion; his life there was uninspiring. So he left, on a monolithic journey to grow and discover himself and a purpose. But when he rides into the red and warm sun he does not notice the blue and cold shadow of him and the blue and cold shadow that follows everything, his every move. He is naïve to the place where the sun does not shine.

As Grady travels further into Mexico, further into his own "heart of darkness," his perception of colors evolves. Life is not just red and white. He notices "those black eyes" of the Mexicans and he notices something dark about their character. He views a gray twilight and feels there is something "imperfect" about it. Then he finds blue, that of his Alenjandra, his first love, her beautiful blue eyes, the blue dress she wears, the matching blue ribbon that ties her hair. She changes him. McCarty presents that through colors: "Those eyes had altered the world forever" (109).

McCarthy often parallels, almost blurs the line between horse and man. McCarthy writes, "The soul's of horses mirror the soul's of man," (110). And much like a wild horse is tamed when his spirit is broken, Grady's is broken, first by Alejandra, and then again by the evil he finds in the world, and in himself. Both are presented through colors, Alejandra's blue, blood's red. Ironically, it was the blue of the shadow, the cold, blue twilight and the warm red sun that he originally trusted, that once inspired him, guided him into his journey.

What he learns, and what McCarthy suggests, is that everything coexists: good and evil, man and horse, love and pain, beauty and horror, warmth and coldness. You can't have one without the other. It is the cruel and unbearable beauty of the world.
Grady was a passionate boy when he set out on his journey. When he returns, after traveling, falling in love, falling in and out of trouble, falling into the depths of his soul, getting as far up and as far down as a man can go, in many capacities, he learns the limits of the human heart, of his soul. He knows what colors exist in the world, and how, and how they exist within him.

McCarthy's novel takes you to the far reaches of beauty, and to the darkest hours of man. His characters suffer, they go to prison, to battle. They love. They kill. Grady sees it all, in other characters, and himself. A once innocent boy who sought the passion and pretty wonders of the world, he finds himself tattered, shredded, bittersweet, worn, and he realizes that beauty exists because of ugliness, happiness because of hatred, and passion because of pain, red because of blue, and vice versa. It is all one and the same.