![]() ![]() It is a kind of double bildungsroman, in which Jim is the ascetic scholar and Antonia the earth mother. It is iterative, quotidian, and insists on a sense of routine even when the events it describes are too particular to have been repeated. ![]() The novel has an episodic/epiphanic structure at the start and end, almost like the land it describes, which “was not a country, but the material out of which a country is made.” In between, it has a more normative structure around Antonia’s extended adolescence and nascent sexuality. We see his narrative, but also its flaws, its failure to cohere, its overdetermined symbolism. Jim, like Nick Carraway, has blind spots in his idealized, Georgic view of Antonia. The unusual frame narrative is that of Jim Burden, whom the unidentified narrator meets on a train and asks to tell Antonia Shimerda’s story. ![]() Willa Cather’s novel explores immigrants and Americans settling in Black Hawk, Nebraska. ![]()
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