Mr_Shank

Being the last section of the book, this is the most exciting and revealing one.  Like i predicted, it does not end happily for John Grady.  He leaves us as a man who truly has nothing.  He has lost his home, his love, his friends; he is completely alone as he rides off into the west.  I would like to specifically talk about a couple of the incidences and decisions that led to this sad conclusion.

When Grady was reunited with Alejandra, she revealed to him that it was her who confessed to their affair.  She was forced to by her aunt who threatened to tell her father if she did not.

“She shook her head. I destroyed everything. I only wanted to die.

Don’t cry.  I’ll make it right.

You can’t, she said.  She raised her eyes and looked at him.  He’d never seen despair before.  He thought he had, but he had not.”

I like this part of Grady’s and Alejandra’s conversation because it made me think about my own life.  I asked myself if i had ever felt despair like this, or if i think i will.  It takes a lot to as depressed as she was.  Consider both of their situations.  Johm Grady was put in jail where he went through torture, killed a man, and lost his friends in.  Alejandra, on the other hand, has lost her father’s love.  The two things don’t seem very comparable, but i think that they have both lost very much for each other.  The only difference is that John Grady has nothing more to lose, so he would be unfazed to elope with his lover, but Alejandra has her family to think about.  Which of the two do you think has it worse in this situation; the one who has lost everything, or the one who has everything to lose?

“The captain either did not know what he was going to do or knowing did not believe.  John Grady had begun to shout even before the gunmetal hissed in the meat.  His shout clapped shut the calls of lesser creatures everywhere about them in the night and the horses all stood swimming up into the darkness beyond the fire and squatting in terror on their great thighs screaming and pawing the stars as he drew breath and howled again and jammed the gun barrel into the second would and held it the longer in deference to the cooling of the metal and then he fell over on his side and dropped the revolver on the rocks where it clattered and turned and slid down the basin and vanished hissing into the pool.”

This is how McCarthy described what i think is the bravest and toughest thing we have seen Grady do.  As he was escaping with his and Blevins horse, he took the captain with him as a hostage.  However, he was shot in the thigh on his escapade.  Knowing that he could not continue travelling with his leg the way it was, he stopped to take care of it.  His way of taking care of it was by closing the wounds with red hot metal.  Being a runner, i know what it is like to have to put up with great amounts of pain.  It takes a very strong person mentally just as much as it does physically to be able to endure that amount of pain.  That is why I feel so impressed with what John Grady did.  Not only that, however, I am also perplexed by his motivation for doing this.  He no longer has Aleajandra to fight for, he already lost her to her own family.  He has no friends left because Rawlins left him.  And perhaps worst of all, he has no home.  i believe that this was an act of desperation on his end, or perhaps he was trying to redeem Blevins.  Whatever it was, John Grady is one heck of a man for it.

If you found yourself in a situation where your life depended upon causing yourself this amount of pain, would you do it?  Would self preservation overcome the fear of pain?  And more importantly, would you be able to do it alone, like John, or would you need someone or something worth fighting for to be able to mutilate yourself like that?

-Ditz