their actions, a responsibility that is tied to nature, fate, and manmade laws. We see this when Maria explains her concept of fate to him, ôIf fate is the law then is fate also subject to the law? At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility. ItÆs in our natureö (McCarthy 1992).
Nature offers Grady the opportunity to connect to others with a sense of meaning, something he has not been able to do with his father or his mother. We are told early on that he is a natural with horses, having a near mystical relationship with them. Horses offer Grady not only a source of love and meaning in an often indifferent environment, but they offer him companionship and even some level of intellectual rapport. We see this when McCarthy (1992) describes Grady and his horse as they travel through La Vega, ôThe horse had a good natural gait and as he rode he talked to it and told it things about the world that were true in his experience and he told it things he thought could be true to see how they would sound if they were said.ö Horses offer Grady a sense of love and communion, one he could not achieve in his former way of life. He then tells the horse why he likes it so much and promises it that he will ôallow no harm to come to itö (McCarthy 1992).
Nature serves a number of roles in the novel. We see in the beginning that it can serve as a source of uniting generations. It also serves as a symbol of power and being. GradyÆs father fails to take advantage of the ability of land to maintain generational ties and its ability to posit power and identity. As one literary critic contends about the land, it represents identity, power, and family lineage, ôThe father owns no land, one of the material signifiers of patriarchal authority. John GradyÆs father fights for neither ownership nor control of the ranch in the divorce proceedingsö (Cole 2001, 161).
In many ways, nature acts as a surrogate power to Grady, in lig...