Bart and John both encountered the four stages of the quintessential mythic quest, in chronologically successive stages of Hazard, Beauty, Choice, and Pain. John's experience was tragically similar to Bart's inter-kitchen quest; sometimes John snagged a cupcake, other times he was shocked, recuperated, and continued. John's mythic quest explores the duality of Hazard and Choice through his hazardous encounter with Blevins, which dramatically altered the subsequent events of his quest; through the beauty of his relationship with Alejandra, which facilitated the attainment, then withdrawal, of John's axis mundi; and through the events surrounding his tenure in the Mexican jail, which besieged John with excruciating pain. .
Hazard and choice were integral in the consummation of John Grady's quest. John Grady Cole was the stereotypical cowboy superimposed into a modern world, in which his romantic conception of the West, along with the ritualistic code of passion, skill, justice, loyalty, and honor it entails, was subjected to physically and psychologically turbulent trials of a painful reality. Throughout his quest, John Grady's actions were in accordance with those of his romantic ideal of a cowboy. His quest, true to mythic form, is initiated by Hazard; the invocation of life-changing circumstance uprooted John Grady from his world, comprised of the ranch and the horses it sheltered. His life was one of beauty: beauty of the past, of the illustrious plains laced with the intricate latticework of hooves, lending the earth a concave form where they had fallen; the potential of the unbesmirched earth to bear the same imprint, waiting for a steed to caress it for an instant, each subsequent impact more beautiful than the previous, each morsel of evidence of instantaneous betrothal of hoof and earth progressing onward toward the horizon.