My Ántonia is a good book to read, it has a good message and the different characters work well together and against each other. In My Ántonia, the two characters that work both with and against each other are Jim and Ántonia. Jim and Ántonia work both and with against each other through their whole childhood. Ántonia cannot go to school so Jim schools her. Jim cares deeply for her, has certain expectations of her and he finds it very difficult to look past her failure
to live up to them. They pursue different paths and end up having very different lifestyles as noticed they would have from the beginning. They become great friends and Jim tries to help her as much as possible, even though they disagree at times. Jim works well with Ántonia and against her at times but they were great friends. Jim and Ántonia are the two different characters that work both and against each other in My Ántonia.
My Antonia took place in the late 19th century. Jim Burden narrated his recollections of Antonia's life and their childhood together, after a twenty-year absence. The novel began when the ten-year-old orphaned narrator moved from Virginia to the plains of Nebraska to live with his grandparents. He spent his childhood alongside his grandparents and a neighbor Bohemian on the prairies. This Russian girl, new to America, was Antonia. Jim and Antonia spent endless afternoons together. He taught her English and about America. Her lessons were of life and strength. His daily life on the farm changed when he moved with his grandparents into the nearest town, Black Hawk. Antonia found a job as a house hand in town, even though her family was still on a farm. Their adolescent years were occupied with dances and picnics. Jim went on to college after graduation. Antonia, never able to go to school, was courted but left with a child out of wedlock. However, soon after, she was married to a fellow Bohemian and they had eleven children. This book is the moving story of his friendship with Antonia, his Antonia.
He is apprehensive about seeing Antonia, fearing that she will no longer be the idealized person who exists in his memory. Jim is not let down when they meet, as even though she is now a “battered woman … but she still had that something that fires the imagination, could stop one’s breath for a moment” (226). Age has not dampened the spirit that Jim was drawn to throughout his youth and now his adulthood. He speaks about her through a lens of true love and respect, telling her children that he “couldn’t stand it if you boys were inconsiderate [towards Antonia] … I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there’s nobody like her” (222). Jim refers to Antonia as a “rich mine of life,” and it is clear that Antonia’s type of richness is more valuable in Jim’s eyes. Through her, he is able to realize that tangible fiscal wealth is far less precious than the impalpable beauty of emotional connection and
In Willa Cather's novel, My Antonia, Marek Shimerda is starved for attention because he is constantly ignored due to his mental retardation. It is solely because of his handicap and the assumption of his inability to help out with the farming and household chores that his family views him as helpless which results in Marek's strange and awkward actions. He is presented as an ill minded young man throughout the novel, repeatedly excused, and resides in the shadow of his healthy, fully functional older brother, Ambrosh Shimerda.
Antonia's mom smokes and she has been really sick lately. Her mom is the antagonist in this story because she can't even get out of bed unless she feels good. Since her mom has been sick, Antonia has to take care of everything around the house, including her brother. So one day Antonia was at a friend's house and her mom and brother decided to go on a picnic and when they were done she took her son to a motel, and then left to go to a bar down the road.
The American college dictionary defines success as 1. The favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors, 2. The gaining of wealth, possessions, or the like. This has been the general seances for the past hundred years or more. But in more modern days the prospective of success has changed slightly. It has shifted to having a good education, going to collage, getting a carrier getting married & having children. Having your own home and eventually dying and passing it all on to a child or children. Success is no longer satisfaction or personal goals. It has been supplemented by the goals society has preset for the populous that have been drilled into the minds of the young from the very beginning. To a man named Santiago in The Old Man and The Sea by: Earnest Hemingway, success was to conquer the Marlin Santiago had fought for so long. But as a cruel twist of fate his success is taken away in an instant when the prize he had fought so hard for was eaten by sharks, leaving Santiago with no spoils left to show for his hard fight. He was even so crushed by of the loss of the Marlin that he cried out to the sea "I am beaten.....hear stands a broken man" (234). Santiago still experienced success in the fashion that when he returned to port the little boy named Manolin that he had taught how to fish earlier in the novel was allowed to come back to fish with him. This was the ultimate form of success that was perceived for Santiago by Hemingway. To Jean Valjean in Les Misreables By: Victor Hugo , Valjean's success was represented in the form of going from convict to loving father of a daughter. The little girl named Cosette may not have been his true daughter, but after he had had dinner with a bishop that had seen the possibility of good in he started the transformation of his life. he met Cosettes mother and vowed to save her daughter from the place where she was being kept. The success Valjean experienced was what made his character the man that he was. But to Willa Cather in My
The second section of the novel contains more diction and syntax which help to show the rift in Ántonia and Jim’s relationship. The way at which Jim narrates in short, concise, and repetitive sentences, helps to put emphasis on certain aspects of the passage. For example he says, “I felt that I never wanted to see her again. I hated her almost
My Antonia, by Willa Cather, is a book tracing the story of a young man, Jim Burden, and his relationship with a young woman, Antonia Shimerda. Jim narrates the entire story in first person, relating accounts and memories of his childhood with Antonia. He traces his journey to the Nebraska where he and Antonia meet and grow up. Jim looks back on all of his childhood scenes with Antonia with nearly heartbreaking nostalgia. My Antonia, is a book that makes many parallels to the sadness and frailty, but also the quiet beauty in life, and leaves the reader with a sense of profound sorrow. One of the main ways Cather is able to invoke these emotions in the reader is through the ongoing theme of separation. Willa Cather develops her theme of separation through death, the changing seasons, characters leaving and the process of growing apart.
Cather mends a special relationship between Jim and Antonia that is formed and broken throughout her novel My Antonia. The two characters meet at young age and begin to develop a ------- friendship. Jim teaches Antonia the language and culture of America while Antonia shares her culture and morals. Soon their respective friendship turns into a brother-sister relationship, an ardent love but not intimate.
As Jim attends school with other children of his social stature, Antonia is forced to manually work in the fields. A division between the two characters is immediately created. Antonia develops resentment towards Jim; "I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now. My mother can't say no more Ambrosch do all and nobody to help him.
In her novel, My Antonia, Cather represents the frontier as a new nation. Blanche Gelfant notes that Cather "creat[ed] images of strong and resourceful women upon whom the fate of a new country depended" . This responsibility, along with the "economic productivity" Gilbert and Gubar cite (173), reinforces the sense that women hold a different place in this frontier community than they would in the more settled areas of America.
Right off, it is apparent that many of the characters struggle to feel comfortable in their own skin. This is especially prominent in Coralie, who faces many challenges in relation to her appearance, often putting herself down for the way that she looks. This reveals that this problem doesn’t merely exist today alone, but extends back as far as the early twentieth century. I was astonished to see a universal problem such as this so pronounced in a remarkably different era, despite the drastic change in women’s rights. Within the novel, it seems that whenever Coralie talks about her hatred regarding her webbed fingers, it stems from her father’s rule of wearing white gloves, as he does, “not wish [of her] to be thought of with disdain” (Hoffman,
The hard-working middle class, with an educated upper class is one of key characteristics of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Likewise, an emphasis on the middle class and socioeconomic discrepancies between classes are central traits of realism. My Antonia, a realist novel by Willa Cather, chronicles the life and development of Jim Burden. Jim is an upper class, well-educated young boy who grows into a Harvard graduate and successful lawyer. His journey and development is constantly assisted by others, whether it is Antonia Shimerda, a poor Bohemian immigrant that Jim befriends, or Gaston Cleric, a college professor and comrade of Jim. It is not until the end of the novel that Jim can exist as a free character, independent of others. Willa Cather’s My Antonia is a tale of the development of Jim Burden, which can be seen through the suicide of Mr. Shimerda, his attempt to kiss Antonia, and his reconciliation with Antonia at the end of “The Pioneer Women’s Story.”
Victoria Guzman is a victim of Direct Violence in her youth, and a perpetrator of Cultural Violence as an adult to make-up for the pain from her past.
There was no other Shakespearean character that embodied the true spirit of evil and ruthless determination as Lady Macbeth. Macbeth by, William Shakespeare is a story shadowed by supernatural events filled with images of selfish violence and innocent blood, all ignited by a character that is like an apparition appearing only to mold the plot and disappear once devastation occurs. William Hazlitt analyzes this character in Macbeth: Critical Essay,
In every story there are always characters that as readers are drawn towards and grown fonder of them, no one likes a story that they can not relate to. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth tragedy, Macbeth is the character that most people feel for. Macbeth displays the general characteristics of a tragic hero throughout the play, catharsis, hubris and he is very easy to relate to.