My Antonia Response Paper

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Response paper In my Antonia the author Willa Cather is telling a story of a boy who befriends a young immigrant girl named Antonia Shimerda. The novel opens with an unnamed narrator recounting a train trip through Iowa the previous summer with an old friend named Jim Burden, with whom the narrator grew up in a small Nebraska town the narrator recounts that Jim mentioned writing down his memories of Ántonia; the narrator expressed to Jim an interest in reading these writings. A few months’ later Jim brings a portfolio of writings about Ántonia to show to the narrator. The narrator adds that Jim, wanting to title the work, wrote “Ántonia” across the front of the portfolio then scribbles “My” before “Ántonia.” As the narrative begins, Jim is ten years old, newly orphaned and making the trip west from Virginia to stay with his grandparents in Black Hawk, Nebraska which is also where Antonia and her family are headed. The narrative of My Ántonia is a look into the past, but in his narration Jim rarely says anything directly about the idea of the past, the overall tone of the novel is very nostalgic. 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. Within the narrative itself, characters often look back longingly toward the past that they have lost. The author also adds Motif a setting in which a person lives and moves. recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes. Of all the cultural differences between the European immigrants and the American settlers (and there are many, often complicated differences, as we see when Jim's grandmother attempts to give the Shimerdas

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