Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.
Exposition (Initial Situation)
A Boy and His Horse
So, in case you were fooled by the title, there is nothing pretty about John Grady Cole's life—horses or no. The beginning of the novel follows John around through changes in his life situation that set the stage for his great escape:
• his grandfather just died
• he's the last heir of a Texas ranch that is being sold by his estranged mother…
• who has long since divorced his sick and slowly dying father.
The novel makes clear that his relationships are stagnant and the place he called home is no more. What else is there to do in a situation like this except ride horses to Mexico with your best friend?
Rising Action (Conflict, Complication)
Never Trust a 13-Year-Old Gunslinger with a Fancy Horse
What starts out as a fun-time adventure in the wilderness takes a more dangerous turn when John and his friend Rawlins run into the young rapscallion Jimmy Blevins along the way. It's clear that Blevins is trouble: he's a crack shot and is riding a fancy horse that they figure no raggedy 13-year-old boy could own.
Sure enough, their association with Blevins leads them to commit the crime that is the source of all their later troubles in the novel: Blevins loses the horse one night, ropes the boys into stealing it back, and they all end up getting shot at and chased out of town. The conflict eases a bit as John and Rawlins escape and find work on a ranch, where John romances the ranch head's beautiful daughter Alejandra.
Climax (Crisis, Turning Point)
No Home on the Range
Although things are okay for a while initially, once the ranch head gets wind of John's involvement with both his daughter and Blevins, rangers come to take John and Rawlins to prison. This marks the novel's most dire turning point as the boys are constantly in mortal danger.
They run into Blevins and learn he shot three people in an attempt to get back at the people who stole his horse. They all get transferred to a larger prison, and Blevins gets illegally executed along the way. Things are no better in prison, where John and Rawlins get beaten up every day. Rawlins gets stabbed and it seems as if John will be next, but he manages to kill his assailant while suffering some pretty bad wounds himself.
In a miracle of miracles, however, John and Rawlins get bailed out of prison by the grandaunt of the girl John romanced. In general, this is where the stakes in the novel are the highest, and where things seem darkest for our heroes before dawn: there's a lot of stabbing, fighting, more stabbing, and then a miraculous rescue.
Falling Action
Road Trip
After the dramatic and desperate prison sequence, a second climax of sorts is set in motion not long after, as John's search to get Alejandra and his horses back leads to desperate measures. Unhappy that Alejandra and her grandaunt made a deal to save him from prison on the basis that John could never see his beloved again, John travels and desperately tries to reach her, likely playing some 80s power ballad at top volume on the radio.
They meet for one last steamy night, but as her grandaunt knew, Alejandra was faithful to the promise she made in the end. The stakes of the romance plot are at their highest here, as John proposes marriage, but Alejandra ends up leaving for good—closing off the romantic portion of the novel.
Out of his despair, he sets off to get his horse and those of his friends back, stealing them back from the town in which he was first imprisoned. In what might be considered a second climax, he also takes the captain of the guard hostage, who had killed Blevins. After some mysterious men take the captain away from him with little explanation—always with the mysterious rescues—John makes it to the U.S. border with all the horses, and is thus finally out of mortal peril.
Resolution (Denouement)
Off into the Sunset
With the novel's romantic and dramatic action sequences over and done with, John begins to drift as the novel closes. He wanders Texas looking for the original owner of Blevins' horse, but never finds that person. He meets with Rawlins and the original Jimmy Blevins, a self-aggrandizing radio preacher who the deceased 13-year-old boy took his name after, but receives no closure or any new information about his dead companion.
John also attends the funeral of his ranch's oldest servant, giving the novel a chance to grapple one last time with the issues it has raised about life and death. The novel trails off uncertainly in the end, where John rides into a red desert and red sun, carrying along the ownerless horse that once belonged to the boy who called himself Blevins.