He existed on the periphery of life, in a world in which he was completely out of his element. Jim observes simply that, in the end, Mr. Shimerda killed himself because “he had… been so unhappy that he could not live any longer” (Chapter XIV).

Jim’s motive for writing his story is to try to reestablish some connection between his present as a high-powered New York lawyer and his vanished past on the Nebraska prairie; in re-creating that past, the novel represents both Jim’s memories and his feelings about his memories.

Cather explores characteristically American questions of identity through the novel’s central relationship, the friendship between transplanted Virginian Jim Burden and Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda.

Intelligent and introspective, Jim is well qualified to be the narrator of the story. His thoughtfulness gives him the ability to portray himself and others with consistency and sympathy and to convey the sense of a lost Nebraska with an evocative, poetic accuracy.

first-person voice

Ántonia as a Symbol She symbolizes the freedom and beauty of the natural landscape in Nebraska. If Ántonia represents natural beauty to the young Jim, then she represents the grandeur of the past to the older, narrator Jim.

She meets and marries Anton Cuzak. She and Cuzak have ten or eleven children together, and own a large farm. Antonia rules the household with a gentle, loving hand. She loves her life on the country and is dedicated to the land.

Jim has a romanticized affection for Ántonia but not quite a romantic affection. He is unable to imagine her in the same light as Lena Lingard, for whom he feels a coarser but perhaps more practical passion. Still, the idealized love that Jim feels for Ántonia eclipses the strength of Ántonia’s feeling for him.

As Cather grows into her unique literary voice, she creates and reconciles the ambivalent role of nature. projects a growing sense of the human experience in nature, as she develops her literary voice. Her female characters tend to value preserved nature.

The most important and universal symbol in My Ántonia is the Nebraska landscape. Cather’s poetic and moving depiction of it is perhaps the most famous and highly praised aspect of the novel. The landscape symbolizes the larger idea of a human environment, a setting in which a person lives and moves.

The Plough Symbol Analysis The plough, a symbol of the farm work the Shimerdas and the Burdens do on the prairie, symbolizes man’s “beautiful and harmonious” connection to the land. This image suggests Jim’s impending separation from Ántonia—while Ántonia remains on the prairie, Jim leaves for good.

Character Analysis Jim Burden. Jim symbolizes the pioneer gone soft. Jim’s memories of Ántonia comprise the main body of the novel. He admires her and is drawn to her in such a way that his memories of her have been burned into his mind.

lawyer

Ántonia Shimerda

Book 4 ends with Jim promising to come back and visit Ántonia soon. Then twenty years pass without him doing so. He justifies this by explaining that he was scared: “I did not want to find her aged and broken; I really dreaded it. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions.

There is no clear antagonist in this novel. While the characters certainly face hardships, and some not-so-nice people (think Wick Cutter), there is no single individual that opposes them.

As a result of the hardships that the Shimerdas suffer, Ántonia and Jim find that a wedge has been driven between them. A couple of years later, the Burdens decide to move into town, and shortly thereafter Ántonia takes a job as a housekeeper with a neighboring family, the Harlings.

MY ÀNTONIA, by Willa Cather, is a story about friendship, love, and immigration. In this early-20th-century novel, Cather provides a biographical narrative of Antonia Shimerda, a character based upon Annie Pavelka, a real-life childhood friend of Cather’s.

Partly in order to devote herself to her writing, Cather never married. She died on April 24, 1947, in New York City.

When Jim awakens on the morning of January 22, he learns that after dinner the night before, Mr. Shimerda committed suicide in the barn, putting the barrel of his gun into his mouth and pulling the trigger with his big toe.