How Does Jim Burden Change In My Antonia

Optimistic Orphan

It’s not often that throughout their lifetime, a person stays the same. As humans, most of us tend to grow and learn from influences that surround us, whether it be family, friends, or strangers, and when this happens, often times our judgement and our opinions are changed. I say “most”, because in Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Jim Burden doesn’t quite show these changes. Jim is the narrator and main character in the book and he portrays a static character, who seems very advanced as a child, and his thoughts on the world never seem to change. While Jim’s physical appearance changes, his intellectuality never seems to stray from what he believes when he first moves to the Nebraskan countryside as a 10 year old boy. When Jim first moves to Nebraska as a 10 year old boy, he takes the train from Virginia with Jake who is to look after him. Riding on the train, Jim is blown away by the stunning beauty of the plains and the landscape of the cornhusker state. He has never seen so much freedom and opportunity when looking at the world. When he is on the farm with his grandparents, his love for the land grows even stronger. Jim absorbs things and takes them in like he never has before, and truly

This is an important and relatively disappointing move for Jim, because this takes away his opportunity to go out and help work and admire the land like he loves to do. He will also miss Antonia dearly, and fears he won’t see her as often. The only thing he has to hold on to, is looking out the window of a room upstairs. He says, “Our own house looked down over the town, and from our upstairs windows we could see the winding line of the river bluffs, two miles south of us. That river was to be my compensation for the lost freedom of the farming country.”(page