![]() ![]() ![]() As the two share news and reminiscences while walking the fields together, they grow intimate: “She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears came up in them slowly. She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked as Mrs. At the age of twenty-four, she suffers so from toothaches and other physical privations that she is convinced that “I’m not going to live very long.”1 At last Jim goes to see Antonia: “We met like people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears. In virtual exile on account of her shame, she performs heavy field work under the tyrannical thumb of her brother Ambrosch. In the meantime, having been seduced, used, humiliated, and abandoned by her fiance Larry Donovan, and having borne a daughter without assistance twenty months before, Antonia has been reduced to a desperate predica ment. ![]() Having completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard, now ready to begin law school, Jim has returned to Nebraska for the summer to visit his grandparents and his old acquaintances. S E L Z E R Penn State University Jim Burden and the Structure of i My Antonia At the close of Book IV of Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Jim Burden (the story’s narrator) describes a climactic episode in his relationship with Antonia Shimerda. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: ![]()
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