The book All the Pretty Horses is a confusing story in the first read. The writer, Cormac McCarthy, doesn't use quotation marks and he also doesn't always explain who is talking. This makes for a very difficult time understanding what is going on in the book. Because I didn't know what was happening, I read the first thirty pages a second time. After, I understood the story line much better. It seems to be about a boy, John Grady Cole, and his want to run his family ranch after his mother leaves his father, and after his grandfather dies. His mother's basis for leaving his father seems to be in his change in personality. This can all be related back to the time that his father has put in to serve the country in the war. While sitting at the dinner table, John and his father talk about his grandfathers death. They get off subject and John starts talking about how his grandfather used to say that he wanted to wait "to have a funeral till they had something to bury, not just dog-tags." The dog-tags imply that his father was in war, seeing as how it is standard for soldiers to carry such things around with them. After hearing his son say this, his father states that he "is not the same person anymore" he would "like to think he is, but he isn't." If he thinks that he had changed, and his wife has left him, it can be thought that the wife's reason for leaving is the change that she has seen in her husband.
Because the wife and husband are divorced, and the wife no longer wants to run the ranch that her father established, she sells it away. John, her own son, is devastated at this decision, so much so, that he goes to a lawyer to try and get him to give him the land. He says that he "isn't a liberty to advise" him in a situation like this. He also claims that he and his father may have been able to keep the ranch if his father had gotten a lawyer during the divorce. After, he tells him to go and talk to his mother and see if she will give him the land. John replies that she "just wants him to go to school." This statement can be taken two ways, either that his mother wants better for him than working on a ranch, or that she doesn't trust him enough to run a ranch on his own. Whatever way it is meant to be taken, it still depresses John.
Maybe to talk to his mother, or maybe just to see her again, John travels to San Antonio, where his mother is staying, and watches her perform in a play that she is in. He doesn't seem like he enjoys the play all that much, but stays and watches it till the end anyways. After, he watches his mother take "the arm of a man in a top hat and walk into a hotel with him." John goes to hotel and asks if there is a Cole registered. The man replies that there isn't. Such news leads may hold another reason that his mother in father are no longer together. Perhaps his mother didn't notice the change in his father at all, maybe she was to busy having an affair with another man. Or maybe not, and the other man just came along afterwards. Whatever the reason, seeing his mother with another man doesn't sit well with John and leaves to return home. The last page I read left off with John saying goodbye to a girl he once went out with because he was getting ready to leave town for good and go somewhere else.
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