Summary Of Nostalgia In My Antonia

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The warm blackness of summer nights, settling over your lawn and drifting down familiar street signs, over coffee shops closed for the night and broken down asphalt. Dust, collecting on creaking wooden floorboards and swirling through age-old sunlight. A song forgotten, notes away from your ears. Nostalgia is an emotion that all human beings experience and know well. Willa Cather expands on this fact, infusing her award-winning novel, My Ántonia, with sentimentalism and melancholy. Cather tells a tale of home, drawing from the idealistic “American dream” that all Americans know well. Jim Burden, a young orphan, moves to the countryside, spending his days watching men work in the dusty fields and find community amongst themselves. He adores …show more content…

Using these methods enables Cather to emphasize differences between Jim and Ántonia, showing her readers the cause of his nostalgia for home: “While [the sun] hung [in the low west], the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel… for five, maybe ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.” Cather represents Ántonia and Jim as the sun and moon, respectively; always pulled back away and together but never meeting. At this passage, Ántonia and Jim had just reunited after many years apart. Jim had returned from Harvard whereas Ántonia had a child. The impossibility of them reconnecting on a fundamental level is much like the moon and the sun, where no matter how close they get, they will never meet. Cather emphasises the difference to explain how Jim misses Ántonia and by extension his home, depicting the change and distance from each other as a great and impossible void to cross. Cather reinstates this point, writing, “I lay awake for a long while, until the slow-moving moon passed my window on its way up the heavens.” (161) Here, Cather calls Jim “slow-moving”, one who reflects life and light rather than emitting it. In comparison, Ántonia is the sun. Cather describes her as a “rich mine of life, like the founders of early races” (162). The further emphasis of difference at this point in their lives enables Cather to …show more content…

I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand… Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past. (170) Cather chooses to refer back to Jim’s past at the end of My Ántonia to emphasize how, even though the story ends, Jim will always remember Ántonia and their experiences together. Despite both of them growing up and leading very different lives, Ántonia and the recollection of his youth are so important to him that he still remembers the days of his childhood, travelling to a place he would call home. Willa Cather’s use of sentimentality-inspiring diction creates a nostalgic memory of Jim’s childhood. Her words are very descriptive and immerse the reader in the scene and tone she

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