What is the Tone?

The tone seemed to me somewhere between the romantic conception of the American West and the morbid realism of what the West would have been like. John Grady Cole dreams of the romantic west where good silences evil and the word cowboy are synonymous with freedom. He goes to Mexico but finds nothing but tragedy. Still his faith remains but the tone is more subdued and resigned. John is not a hero more than a ghost of a hero.Cormac McCarthy walks a tightrope between a sense of a romanticized west and, perhaps, the real west.