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Analysis Of My Antonia By Willa Cather

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Imagine huddling with your family, trapped under feet of snow and with dwindling supplies of food in the winter. Imagine working for hours on end in the 120 degree weather in the summer. Imagine watching you and your family wither away in inhuman conditions. These were some of the many perils the early American settlers faced. Winter and summer formed a doubled-edged sword. In addition, periods of drought, rainstorms, tornadoes, swarms of grasshoppers could destroy fields of crops. For experienced farmers it was a Herculian task to build a home and establish a farm, but the free land, abundant wildlife, and the rich soil was so enticing, the opportunity hard to resist. My Antonia by Willa Cather embodies not just the physical hardships, …show more content…

Jim’s motive for writing his story is to try to reestablish some connection between his present as a New York lawyer and his vanished past on the Nebraska prairie. Additionally, within the narrative itself, other characters often look back longingly toward a past that they have lost. When Mr. Shimerda survey the squalor his family lived in, Mr. Shimerda believed ‘that peace and order had vanished from the earth,” or existed only “in the old world he had left so far behind.”() Living in Black Hawk, Jim and Ántonia recall their days on the farms; Lena looks back toward her life with her family; the Shimerdas and the Russians reflect on their lives in their respective home countries before they immigrated to the United States.The two principal qualities that the past seems to possess for most of the characters in the novel are that it is unrecoverable and that it is, in some way, preferable to the present. Antonia misses life in Bohemia just as Jim the lawyer misses life in Nebraska, but neither can possibly return. This impossibility may have been autobiographical as well, informed by Cather’s own longing for her Nebraska childhood. Since if the past can never be recovered, it can never be escaped, either, and Jim is fated to go on thinking about Black Hawk long after he has left

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The men among these settlers were not equipped to handle the manual labor in creating a colony. Not even the servants of these gentlemen were able to endure the labor. This was quite the setback in the colonizers plans in the New World. In result of the failing crops and the unskillfulness of the men among the settlers, half of the settlers died that first winter.

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This visitation had intensified the already vivid memories of his childhood. Lena’s visit had brought along an aura of warm and friendship with her. Lena’s visit had brought along a surge of flashbacks as Jim had stated he could plainly hear the laughs of the Danish and Bohemian girls. However, Lena eventually has to leave and Jim’s best days fled with her. Though everyone goes through a cycle of some sort throughout their life the one I have witnessed while reading My Antonia is to an extent is very different.

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Sometimes droughts in Nebraska made it very difficult to feed their families and still have some left over to sell. Which was difficult because this is how they earned a living. Most pioneers lived in sod houses. These were insulated which was very convenient for Pioneer families during the different seasons. Almost every family member played a role in the pioneer life.

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The fail to properly plan for their voyage shows the unpreparedness and unsafe circumstances the settlers were living with. Captain John Smith, who had brought much-needed authority to the colonists, returned to England due to a gunshot wound he received. His departure happened to fall just months before winter came, leaving the unprofessional settlers wallowing in their inadequacy. With no structure the settlers were ill-fated in becoming the first permanent of the new

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Because of these three things, starvation, lack of people to fill occupations, and drought, the colonists suffered a great deal.

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These topic of adolescence through Jim shapes the meaning behind Cather’s story to be about life and

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My Antonia: Jim and Tony’s Unrequited Relationship “I’d like you to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister, anything that a woman can be to a man (206).” Jim Burden, a young man, narrated his memories and friendship with a young immigrant named Antonia Shimerda. My Antonia was a novel that showed incapable relationship between two characters, but displayed the real beauty and love in life. Willa Cather’s book illustrated how the main characters created a strong friendship, but, were separated from a relationship by societal norms and expectations.

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In the book My Antonia by Willa Cather, one of the main characters is Antonia. Willa Cather admires the character Antonia for a variety of reasons. In fact, the character is actually based off of an actual girl from Willa Cather's childhood. The girl she choose to base Antonia off of was also the daughter of an immigrant who committed suicide after suffering through hopelessness and despair. I believe that Will Cather really admired Antonia for her positive attitude and her ability to always make the best of her situations, even when they are unideal.

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In the book “My Antonia” by Willa Cather, the character Jim describes happiness as, “. . . to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”. Antonia, a blissfully innocent foriegn girl, would agree with this thought.

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In My Antonia, young Jim Burden moves to the Midwest prairie to live with his grandparents after his parents’ death. Whilst meeting the Shimerdas, a Bohemian immigrant family, Jim quickly befriends their daughter Antonia. The two remain friends all the way through their childhood. In adolescence, Jim and his grandparents move to Black Hawk, a nearby small town. Later, Antonia moves to the town as a “hired girl”, keeping house for Jim’s neighbors.

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Antonia is a curious person by nature, always wanting to learn. She wants to learn the ways of the West, while learning English. The names of the native plants, and the color of the sky are things that she comes to know. Though, at first, it was tough for her because she could only gesture towards thing, she is able to learn them. And, she seems to relish in the fact that she now knows them, and that she can pronounce them correctly.

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Challenges of Immigration: The Shimerda’s Struggle Willa Cather’s novel, My Ántonia sheds light on the topic of immigration. Immigrants have many different reasons for why they might migrate to the United States. Some were trying to escape something from their old country such as avoiding a war, trouble with the law, or shame as is the case of the Russians Pavel and Peter. Reasons for immigrating could also relate to chasing the American dream as is the case with the Shimerdas.

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Journey on the Western Expansion was long and gruesome. Compared to what society has today, American Settlers had to face many challenges that were often hard to face in the first place. As people of today, we get the means of transportation to save the time of difficult journeys and medicine to heal us from illness, but after seeing Martha’s life on the trail through the interview, her and her family’s life led to a difficult path to just getting to Oregon. Overall, being a pioneer in the 1800’s was an exhausting trip, and it’s nothing at all like

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He is justly doubtful when Jim natural morality negates the compressing burden of his past and surpasses the pain that has been imposing on him. Schmitz blames Mark Twain for his submission to the racial pattern of the restore. Jim who is “shorn of his personal matter, no lengthy actively hooked in the procedure of living and trapped in the confinement of the white person’s mind.” Jim does appear to change, from a credible total man to an outwardly fragmentary, two-dimensional racial stereotype individual (Robinson, Dec

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Abstract The topic the researcher focuses on in this essay discusses the evidence of Jim’s role in Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For example, Twain portrays Jim and Huck’s relationship as one important function that Jim plays during the entirety of the novel. Essentially, the friendship between Huck and Jim remains consistent, where separation brings anxiety and worries, and their reunion exudes relief and contentment.

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