The Sublime and the Western in Cormac McCarthy`s All the Pretty Horses

The western is one of the three main literary traditions of which Cormac McCarthy’s novels partake. All the Pretty Horses (the first novel in The Border Trilogy) falls squarely within this genre. This essay addresses McCarthy s version (appropriation) of the western in the novel in relation to the seminal motif of the sublime. This is discussed mainly in terms of the writer s deployment of parody as a strategy often used by postmodern authors to undermine popular genre conventions as well as cultural myths. Also discussed in this regard is how this trope marks the difference between the past and the present sensibilities. Central to our analysis is thus the double function of parody in McCarthy s novel, that is, the idea that thematically this device/strategy is used as a means of criticizing some aspects of American cultural identity and stylistically it serves to simultaneously debunk and appropriate (some of) the generic conventions of the western.