Fate In The Awakening And The Searchers

My Antonia, by Willa Cather, is a novel about Jim Burden and his relationship and experiences growing up with Antonia Shimerda in Nebraska. Throughout the book Jim reflects on his memories of Nebraska and the Shimerda family, often times in a sad and depressing tone. One of the main ways Cather is able to provoke these sad emotions within the reader is through the suicide of Antonia’s father, Mr. Shimerda. His death was unexpected by everyone and it is thought that homesickness is what drove him to take his own life. Homesickness was surely felt by Mr. Shimerda, as it was by many, but it was the failure to adequately find a way to provide for his family that sent Mr. Shimerda into a

In My Antonia by Willa Cather, a character named Jim moves to Nebraska, also known as the Wild West, because his parents died. There, he meets his grandparents for the first time. He also notices an immigrant, Lena Lingard whom he meets outside of Black Hawk on her family's farm. Later in life, he moves to Lincoln University, to become a lawyer and is mentored by Gaston Cleric. Overall, Jim has been influenced and changed by the impact of befriending and meeting different people of different lifestyles.

My Ántonia is a novel by Willa Cather. This novel is set in the plains of Nebraska some time between the late 1860's and the early 1880's. Jim Burden is the main character whom the story follows as he first arrives in Nebraska when he is ten; he eventually grows up and moves away, but one day comes back to visit his home town. The story is mostly about Jim's relationship with a young immigrant girl named Ántonia Shimerda (later Ántonia Cuzak) who is two or thee years Jim's senior. The story begins as Jim travels west to his grandparent's homestead in Nebraska from his Virginian home where both of his parents have died.

He went to college for his parents, and would have become a lawyer to please his parents. But he wasn’t satisfied with that. He travelled looking for the answers he could not seem to find doing what everyone else was. As he travelled from Mexico to South Dakota, to California, and eventually Alaska, he learned more than he ever could at his mundane job. This is because he couldn’t control as much of his environment.

In Book V, Chapter I, Jim returns to Nebraska after being gone for twenty years. He has heard different things about Antonia over the years, but has been concerned that she would not be the same person after having gotten married, given birth to, and raising eleven children. When he arrives, Antonia doesn’t initially recognize him. When she does, she tells him, “I can’t think of what I want to say, you’ve got me so stirred up.”

In Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, Jim Burden romanticized his world, especially his childhood friend Ántonia Shimerda. She was more than just a childhood memory, “more than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood” (35). Ántonia rejected fully Americanizing herself in Black Hawk and regressed back to the farm-life, where she stayed deeply connected to the Earth. This is opposed to her counterpart, Lena Lingard, who fully assimilated into American culture. Jim’s love for Ántonia does not prevent him from following the American trajectory that separates them.

I. We discover the Great Plains and Ántonia through the eyes of Jim, and he perceives both as strange, exotic, and mysterious when he first experiences them. On a wagon ride during his first night in Nebraska, approaching his new home, Jim notes, "I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it and were outside man's jurisdiction" (Cather 36). That same night, Jim meets Ántonia and her family for the first time and comments, "I pricked up my ears, for it was positive the first time I had ever heard a foreign tongue" (Cather 36). In the Nebraska night, Jim experiences both the land and Ántonia as unfamiliar, unknown, foreign, and exotic.

Jim meets Antonia’s family and leaves the next day after catching yp with Antonia’s life. Jim realizes that a man’s life goes in a circle and, “ For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again.” (Cather 238) Jim and Antonia after catching up discovered that they both went in two different life paths. Jim wen to school and got married but had no kids, while Antonia did not go to school but got married and has eleven kids. Jim and Antonia are physically in different paths but destiny draws them together at the end. They will also meet up at the end when they have not met each other in twenty years. Jim and Antonia’s relationship is fate and is another reason why they have a strong bond.

My Antonia is a philosophical story, with dream-like ideas left and right. Even so, the book’s main theme was clearly the transition or journey from childhood to adulthood. This theme applied to both the main characters, Jim and Antonia, who were children when the story begins and adults when it ends. At ten years old, Jim Burden moved to the plains of Black Hawk, Nebraska. His parents had died in an epidemic, and Jim was sent to live with his father’s parents on their Nebraska farm. In his new home, he met a Bohemian girl named Antonia, a free-spirited, lively, unique personality. He fell in love with her, and although his feelings were not returned, he and Antonia became great friends. The book has numerous examples of traditional obstacles that people their ages go through, along with additional hardships such as poverty and death of close family members. Antonia developed a sense of independence that became her most prominent trait throughout the book. The characters found activities and places where they felt like they belonged, and they began to discover who they were. As Jim (the narrator) states, “The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again.” Jim was speaking of a place

It symbolises progress and an evanescent past; the prairie is developed under it’s old windy roads replaced by straight ones; the tall planes of grass burned down to make room for farmland. As Jim gets older, the prairies he once knew symbolises his friendship with Ántonia as well as the nostalgia manifested upon his life as orphaned boy in Nebraska. Lena looks back on her life with her family; the Russians and the Shimerdas reflect back on their lives in their home countries before immigrating to America. Jim’s motive for writing his story is to try to recreate some connection between his present life as a New York lawyer and his childhood in the prairies of Nebraska. Characters of My Ántonia are seen to be yearning for the past that they’ve

As Antonia and Jim grow apart, there is a good amount of time that pass both characters. Both Antonia and Jim took different paths that were overshadowed by the past events of their childhood, it could be said that Jim had a much easier life than Antonia had, as Antonia said “Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us.” (Cather 159) Jim departs to go to college and to a high paying job, while Antonia remains in the prairie where there will continue to be difficulties for her and her family to survive and overcome the challenges. The Bohemian immigrant family has many hardship they must overcome. From homesickness to language barriers, the family seems to adjust accordingly and end up overcoming these hardships in their lives. After twenty years of not seeing Antonia, Jim is afraid she has changed and no longer is the vivid young girl she once was. When they reunite, Jim now gets to know Antonia as a grown up and is pleased to find out that she is still the vivid spirit he once remembered. Instead of having Antonia as a symbol of his pass, Jim creates a relationship with her new-found husband and children, and is happy with

Here we see that there is a moral to his life that needs to be completed and even though he comes back to a “lucky” life with money and women, he isn’t control of his free

     Throughout the book "My Antonia" by Willa Cather, there is a twisting and turning of Sexual and Gender issues. There also tends to be a tension surrounding the different classes between the Black Hawk towns people, and what are called, "the hired girls" or the people from the country. These distinctive qualities in this novel start being shown in the very beginning or the story where Jims' best-friend speaks about the life of Jim and the path with whom he chose to travel. We watch the love of Jim grow farther and farther distant due to the inevitable tensions of classes, sexuality, and gender.

The book My Antonia carried many themes throughout the book, along with many different ideas. In this particular section (pages 240-264), the theme was reminiscence. In this part of the reading, Jim returns to visit Antonia on two separate occasions. Each time, Jim and Antonia relive the memories of their past. Throughout the book, the idea of reminiscence is found in the tone/mood, the characters, and the setting. Willa Cather’s book, My Antonia, displays a recurring theme of reminiscence.

The setting of the story has tremendous impact on the characters and themes in the novel "My Antonia" by Willa Cather. Cather's delicately crafted naturalistic style is evident not only in her colorfully detailed depictions of the Nebraska frontier, but also in her characters’ relationship with the land on which they live. The common naturalist theme of man being controlled by nature appears many times throughout the novel, particularly in the chapters containing the first winter.