My Antonia

The symbol which best encapsulates Cather's vision of the pioneer era is that of the plough momentarily magnified to heroic size against the setting sun. For Cather, what triumphed on the prairie was the spirit of agriculture, which led to the creation of homesteads, settlements, and communities and created the conditions for the flowering of civilization. Just as the plough experiences a moment of apotheosis before shrinking back to its realistic size somewhere on the prairie, so too the pioneer era exploded in all its vigor in Nebraska in the late 1800s and then faded into the obscurity of history, This symbol is also emblematic of Cather's overall technique in her Nebraska novels, for only with the special illumination of her imagination are her ordinary materials transformed and glorified.

During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had both known long ago. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.

This passage from the Introduction is the first the reader hears of Ántonia. The narrator of the Introduction, who grew up with Jim and Ántonia in Nebraska, describes a train ride taken with Jim many years later and details their conversation about Ántonia. They agreed that Ántonia, more than any other person, seemed to represent the world they had grown up in, to the point that speaking her name evokes “people and places” and “a quiet drama . . . in one's brain.” This quotation is important because it establishes that Ántonia will both evoke and symbolize the vanished past of Jim's childhood in Nebraska. It situates Ántonia as the central character in Jim's story and explains Jim's preoccupation with her by connecting her to his memories of the past. Finally, it establishes Jim's character with its implication that Jim shares the unnamed narrator's romantic inclination to dwell on the past and to allow people and places to take on an extraordinarily emotional, nostalgic significance.

“I never know you was so brave, Jim,” she went on comfortingly. “You is just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you go for him. Ain't you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show everybody. Nobody ain't seen in this kawn-tree so big snake like you kill.”

Ántonia speaks these lines in Book I, Chapter VII, praising Jim for having killed the rattlesnake. Jim is angry with Ántonia for failing to warn him about the snake (in a moment of panic, she screams out in her native language), and she quickly appeases him by gushing about his bravery and manliness. The quote captures Ántonia's way of speaking in the early part of the novel, as she is learning English; it also represents a moment of transition in Jim's relationship with her. Because she is older than Jim, Ántonia has had a tendency to treat him somewhat condescendingly, to ...