Journal 1
Pre-Journal
The Foreword wrote in 1995 by Kathleen Norris. She introduces the Foreword with her background and it start in the mid-1970 with she get to read the novel by Willa Cather’s My Antonia. I think Norris wrote the foreword just to introduces the reader to the book as well as Willa Cather’s biographical and how is connect to the story. She wrote some of her own idea in the foreword just to show the reader what going on back in that time. I think in the foreword is have a lot of information to show me “The generation now is the driver’s seat hates to make anything, want to live and die in an automobile, scuffing past those acres where the old men used to follow the long cornrows up and down. They want to buy everything ready-make
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They both live in New York now, but they never see each other much. Jim is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways and he is often away from his office for weeks. Another reason that the narrator and Jim don’t see each other is that she don’t like Jim wife. Cather is talking to Jim along the way in the burning day about a Bohemian girl whom they had known from a long time ago. And Jim is telling the narrator about the book he wrote about this girl Antonia when he away on the long trips across the country, and she want to read Jim account of Antonia. Several months later, Jim delivers his untitled portfolio to the narrator's New York apartment; the narrator has written nothing but a few notes here and there on the subject. After deliberating a moment, Jim writes across the cover of his manuscript, "Antonia." Then, pausing a moment, he impulsively scribbles another word. The manuscript becomes "My Antonia.” After Jim father and mother past away Jim were only ten years old. He has to move from Virginia to Black Hawk where his grandparent is. On the train ride he got to meet the Bohemian family that when Jim meet Antonia for the first time. Afterword they get to meet again on Sunday when Mrs. Burdens and Jim go around to see the neighbors. He and Antonia ran off to play while the adult is talking. After Christmas Mrs. Shimerda and Antonia …show more content…
He designs to move into Black Hawk town. April came; Jim feels that the town is like his home. "I could fight, play 'keeps,' tease the little girls, and use forbidden words as well as any boy in my class," he says. The townspeople enjoy news and culture by traveling only a short distance from home; they don’t want to cut off from these comforts. One of the interesting contrasts is how much Jim is changings after he moves into town. The influenced around him, Jim learns to fight, swear, and tease the girls. But for Antonia, she is change from the roughness of her country life of a nice person. Lena talks to Jim and tell him about her feeling that what she want Jim to become a traveling salesman when Jim grows up because she think it will lead him to wonderful thing. The narrator compares Antonia with Lena one of her immigration friends, that Antonia has a strong sense of what is right and what is wrong, but Lena is the opposite, she rather loose her morals, and all the young boy wants to play around with her just to carnal. Afterward, Jim gets some time alone with Antonia, along the way back to the Harling house, they stand right in front of the gate and talk until the cold chills the restlessness out of
The main character in this story is a Jewish girl named Alicia. When the book
Mrs. Burden gets Antonia a temporary job helping her neighbors around the house. Antonia learned English much faster and Jim met many new people. This is where we meet Lena. Lena was a Norwegian girl who later became a dressmaker, but distracted men with her flirtatious act and planned never to marry. As Jim met new people and attended the dances put together in the city, he noticed the segregation and the generalizations made about specific people.
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.
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
Antonia's mom smokes and she has been really sick lately. Her mom is that 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 freind's house and her mom and brother decide 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. When she was done at the bar, she went back to the motel and passed out on the floor. So when Antonia got home, nobody was there. About a half an hour later, her brother called and said that their mom had passed out and that they were at a motel. Her brother didn't know the name of the motel so he looked around and remembered the bar. He told his sister the name of the bar that their mom had gone to and then she knew right where they were.
Dreams are nothing but our innermost desires. We are made to pursue these dreams and have them be the driving force in all we do. Jim Burden is no different; like everyone, he has dreams, and he does his best to pursue them and fulfill them. Or does he? Jim writes the story of Antonia through his own life. He is plagued with the disease of romanticism. He cannot move on; though time will move, Jim's thoughts and emotions are rooted in the past. Frances Harling said it right when she said, "the trouble with you, Jim, is that you're romantic." Jim is a romantic, a dreamer who never acts. Many things contribute to Jim's romanticism, his experiences, his emotions, and his actions; however as no one could suspect, it helped him mature and appreciate loves lost.
Jim Burden’s early years follows the structure of the idealized childhood of the American West, one where he can run freely in the country and is surrounded by the natural world. However, prejudices are still prevalent in his community, and have a noticeable effect on its inhabitants as they mature. From a young age, members of the Black Hawk, Nebraska community are instilled with the idea that daughters
This chapter reading by Andrea Olive provided background of the Canadian environmental issues of terms of its substance and political discourse. The author focuses on the wide range history of environmentalism in Canada, as well as highlights the ‘waves that occurred in the twentieth era. Then looks at the most current Conservative government. Throughout this chapter Olive explains and teaches environmental policy and events that occurred waves. The author constructively outline the reason and causes of the Third wave. The critical issues occurring policymaking environmental challenges and even opportunity that Canada has been facing throughout its history and twenty-first century was discussed within this chapter. Thus, my review on this
Cather sets the tone of the story at the very beginning; a young Jim Burden's parents have died leaving him to go to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. Right from the start Cather plants the seeds of abandonment, with the finality of death, in Jim's life. When he arrives in Nebraska he is very numb to life, but he is soon caught up in daily life on his grandparents' farm. He is blissfully happy when he first meets Antonia. They become great friends and share numerous adventures. Cather uses brief, beautifully descriptive and nostalgic recollections of situations and feelings to increase the pain and sadness of the separations that she places throughout the book. An excellent example of this is the way Cather builds up to Mr. Shimerda's suicide.
Jim’s character is defined not just by his own introspective nature but the setting he is in and the individuals that he meets influence his life. The journey that he undertakes from innocence to experience is influenced by all these factors. We first see Jim as an innocent and quiet young man who spends much of his time watching the migratory and native birds on the coast of QLD. David Malouf foregrounds these themes of innocence and experience by portraying Jim the protagonist as an unknown threat as the reader slowly has to develop a back story about the main character as the novel progresses forward. Clearly, without the searing experiences of war, Jim would definitely not have grown up the way he did. It’s not just the violence and brutalities of war that transformed his own innocence to experience but some of the mental and physical barriers he’s faced throughout his journey. “He weaved about, but very light. He might have been executing a graceful dance, all on his own there, till another figure, hurling itself from the shadows, brought him down. There were thumps. A woman’s raucous laughter. ‘Abos,’ the girl said again with cool disgust, as the rituals being enacted, however violent, and in whatever degenerate form, were ordinary and not to be taken note of”. (PG
Jim tries to model himself after a man who is crushed by the yoke of caring for his family. Since he has no paternal figure in his life, Jim is unable to decipher the emotional pain of Mr. Shimerda. At this point, Jim first starts to contemplate his romanticized view on life. The irony of this is when Mr. Shimerda promises to give Jim his gun after he becomes a real man. Antonia translates it into, “My tatinek say when you are big boy, he give you his gun” (Cather 32). Mr. Shimerda defines being a real man as being able to provide for your family, which he has been unable to do since they migrated to Nebraska. This causes a chain reaction in Jim and Antonia. Mr. Shimerda's death causes Jim and Antonia to sort of diverge paths with their decision making, and as Antonia begins to age. She takes on the parental role, or catalyst, that Jim needs to develop as a character.
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.
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.
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.
...one sometimes finds one's self behaving in bad dream" (Cather 158). After then, he feels he never want to see Antonia again; and he hates her as much as he hates Cutter. This accident pushes Jim to leave Antonia and to go to Lincoln for study.