Threaded Discussion #4: My Antonia

Just as the Nebraska landscape initially seems formless to Jim, his narrative begins in a seemingly unstructured way. Many early critics of the novel complained about its lack of structure and didn’t consider it a proper novel. The book has little in the way of a conventional plot, but it still forms a cohesive whole. What unifies the narrative? How does Cather bring the novel full circle, mirroring Jim’s observation, “What a little circle man’s experience is”?

Threaded Discussion #4: My Antonia Answer

After reading Willa Cather’s “My Antonia,” the structure may be non-conforming to the way novels are written because of how it used Jim’s experience and the duration of time the basis of the narrative but in this way, the cohesive whole of the story’s gist is created. What unifies the novel is how Jim narrated the passage of time with his recollection of Antonia, his childhood, and the events that happened to his life as an observer of the people around him and as an observer of the changes that happen to people over time.