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An Analysis Of Willa Cather's My Antonia

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My Ántonia – Fact or Fiction?
The narrator describes her childhood town as “..buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky…in the colour and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvest; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and grey as sheet-iron (Cather, Introduction).” Within the novel “My Ántonia,” the author, Willa Cather creates a fictional character Jim Burden whose childhood experiences seems to mirror Cather’s own life. This heartwarming story, written in autobiographical form, tells a tale of two very different people thrust together in similar circumstances during a vulnerable time in both of their lives. They forge a friendship that withstands much happiness, many hardships, and endures a lifetime. Could it be that Willa Cather was really describing the own emotions, feelings, and adventures of her own …show more content…

Comparing Cather’s brilliantly scripted novel to her biography, one cannot stop to wonder if My Ántonia was actually a disguised (partial) autobiography of Willa Cather, a life full of passion, emotion, and memories. In the end of the novel, one of Jim Burden’s final visits to his home town to see Ántonia, he walks around town and finds himself on the road where he had met Ántonia as they arrived at their new destination. This road, “the road of Destiny; [that] had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be (Cather, 372)”, shaped the course of Jim and Ántonia’s friendship as well as their lives. Just as the changing seasons and Nebraska landscape shaped the personalities of its inhabitants, it directly influenced Willa Cather’s perception of herself, her life, and her

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