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Similarities Between A Wagner Matinee And My Antonia

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5. While My Antonia and A Wagner Matinée (written by Willa Cather) are stories that differ greatly in the aspect of narrators and occurrences, both of these pieces have similar themes. They both show an appreciation towards the prairie and how the prairie affected the lives of the people who lived off of them. Both the main characters of these works first saw desolation in the prairie, then came to see the actual beauty in it. In Book I (The Shimerdas) of My Antonia, Jim Burden described Nebraska on page 11 as “There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills, or fields…There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries were made”. While Jim describes the plains as nothingness, the narrator of A Wagner Matinée (Clark) compares his own modern town to the “inconceivable silence of the plains” and how the land he knew was “the flat world of the ancients…more merciless than those of war” (paragraph 12). …show more content…

In chapter 3, paragraph 10 of My Antonia in Book V Cuzak’s Boys, the character Jim is older and had just finished visiting with his childhood friend Antonia. As he goes back to the “desolate” place he once disliked, he “felt at home again. Over head the sky was that indescribable blue of autumn, bright and shadow less, hard as enamel”. He goes on and describes the beauty of what he sees and how the feeling was nostalgic, not bitter. In The Wagner Matinée, the main character sees the grace and beauty of the prairie through his Aunt Georgianna when she showed that she held the beauty within her after listening to the

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