Examples Of Alienation In My Antonia

In chapter X of My Antonia, there is a conflict between Mrs. Harling and Antonia. Antonia is seen trying to find another job with another group of family because she was told by Mrs. Harling that she should stop going to dances. Antonia was furious about this and decided to leave this job in search for another. She states, “A girl like me has got to take her good times when she can. Maybe there won’t be any tent next year, I guess I want to have my fling, like the other girls.” This particular passage tells the reader that Antonia is searching for her own independence and she will do anything to seek it.

As fate may have it, Jim does indeed return to Black Hawk twenty years later to find that while he feels like he’s living an unfulfilled life, drifting around, Antonia has settled down and had many children with Anton Cuzak, a fellow native Bohemian. Jim listens to Ántonia happily tell stories about her children and the two spend the day looking at old photographs and telling stories. Jim feels like he knows all members of the family because Ántonia describes their lives so well.

Jim’s relationship with Antonia shapes him as a character and provides him with the tools to grow from a child to a young adult.

In their passages, N.S. Momaday and D. Brown differ in how they used imagery as Momaday displays his admiration for the land while Brown illustrates the devastation of the land. Momaday describes that in summer "there are green belts along the rivers and creeks, linear groves of hickory and pecan, willow and witch hazel" (Momaday). Through this, Momaday admires the landscape and tries to explain the beauty of nature. Additionally, he uses onomatopoeia when he describes the grasshoppers “popping up like corn,” emphasizing the ecstatic and lovely scenery (Momaday). As he uses a metaphor to compare the prairie during the summer to an anvil’s edge, he further creates a scenic image of the land, emphasizing the hot weather and create an intense image. In contrast, Brown writes a similar landscape but with a dreary image. Frustrated, he abhorrently describes that in one summer "the sun baked the dry earth drier, the streams

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.

Cather writes, “I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures where the land was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass of early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there I felt at home again” (Cather 417). Although years had gone by and Jim had grown up, he still calls the Prairie his home. Where you grow up is crucial in one's upbringing. Jim met Anornia in the prairies of Nebraska and it will forever be his patria.

The central narrative of My Antonia could be a check upon the interests, and tho' in his fib Jim seldom says something directly concerning the concept of the past, the general tone of the novel is very unhappy. Jim’s motive for writing his story is to do to change some association between his gift as a high-powered any professional person and his nonexistent past on the NE grassland ; in re-creating that past, the novel represent each Jim’s retention and his feelings concerning his recollections. in addition, inside the narrative itself, persona usually look rachis yearningly toward the past that they need losing, particularly when Book I. Life in blackness Hawk, Jim and Ántonia recall their Day on the farm Lena appearance back toward her spirit together with her family; the Shimerdas and therefore the Russian mirror on their lives in their several home countries before they immigrated to the United Country .

But Ántonia did not feel the same way as Jim did. They soon go their separate ways, Jim started to works super hard in his studies and ends up going to Harvard to finish his law studies. Jim returned to Black Hawk after some time and realized that Ántonia had become pregnant and moved off to Denver were the father of the child lived. The father of the child soon deserted Ántonia and left her broke with nothing. Jim searched hard for Ántonia and wanted to know what has happened since they last saw each other.

Why do many immigrants make the long and usually costly move to America? Is it the largely idolized notion that Americans are wealthier with better opportunities? Moreover, is the price some pay worth the risk? In Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, Ántonia faces struggles as a young child, including language barriers, poverty, harsh living conditions, and her beloved father’s death. However, as Ántonia grows into a woman, she must face struggles of a social nature, such as the division of social and economic classes, as well as social opprobrium. While immigration to America may open many doors for immigrants, it is equally fraught with obstacles. Likewise, Ántonia must face many adversities after her emigration from Bohemia to Nebraska, which

At school, he seems to feel constricted by “the blackboard and the desks and shelves and the…walls” that are the first things he sees when he looks up. This may represent that school feels like a closed in area where he cannot escape from the “figures and the red-pencil corrections”, which he goes back to looking at after looking out of the window. The window can be seen as physical barrier separating them from the outside world, leaving them in a confined space which they cannot escape from. This would make him feel more secluded from others outside of the school, which could lower his social relationships with others outside of his school. But in the fields that “were…wide flat acres of wheat”, there is a sense of freedom and openness.

Throughout My Antonia, the difference between immigrants and native lifestyles are shown. While neither Jim not Antonia is rich, Jim is definitely more well off than her. He knows the language and has enough that he can have more opportunities. Antonia realizes that her life is going to be more difficult and that she will have to work more because of her mother’s decision to move to America. She tells Jim that “if I live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us,” (90) and knows that her gentle personality might be at stake. This also foreshadows future events where Antonia struggles as an immigrant farmer. It adds obstacles to her life which might lead to them drifting apart in their friendship, even complete separation. This relates to the world in how immigrants had a harder time getting going in life. Antonia’s mother has already become changed because of poverty. She is grasping, selfish, and believes everyone should help her family. Jim’s grandmother defends her, knowing that, “a body never knows what traits poverty might bring out in them,” (60), though it is socially unacceptable. The pressures of helping her family led Antonia to not be educated and become a farmer. She is happy, but this leads to Jim being away, “twenty years before I kept my promise,” (211) as he is a successful lawyer and travels. They still have old connections, though being from Bohemia did change Antonia’s life and where it could have gone.

She has adapted to an environment that is no longer new to her. Even though Ántonia has assimilated into the United States, her heart is still home. Being “American” did not change her memories or beliefs she formerly had in Bohemia. “It makes me homesick, Jimmy, this flower, this smell..when .I was little I used to go down there to hear them talk—beautiful talk, like what I never hear in this country (Cather 167).” She uses her old Bohemian life as a reminder of change, but not necessarily forgetting.

Jim’s relationship with Antonia shapes him as a character and provides him with the tools to grow from a child to a young adult.

Cather’s work, My Antonia, is a memoir told from Jim Burden’s perspective, as he recollects his youth moving from Virginia to life on the plains of Black Hawk, Nebraska. Upon moving in with his grandparents, Jim begins to admire Antonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant who moved to Black Hawk alongside the rest of her family, the Shimerdas. As Jim spends more time in Black Hawk, he bears witness to the many hardships which the Shimerdas faced, such as their limited proficiency with English, their horrible financial situation, and the death of the father, Mr. Shimerda. Later in the novel, Jim moves into town to further his education, while Antonia moves into town to find work. In town, Jim finds more hard-working immigrants, known as the “Hired

world and does not care to return to it. At this point, the reader begins to pity Jim,