Change and Transformation

Willa Cather's straightforward story of Antonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant to Nebraska, parallels the change in the lives of the two principal characters with the transformation of the Great Plains. Antonia is fourteen when we first see her; Jim Burden ten. Both have been wrenched from their origins, Antonia from her native Bohemia, Jim from Ins parents' home in Virginia. She is an immigrant. He is an orphan. It is no surprise we encounter them first in motion on a train. They are carried through an empty land. "There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made." That first ride is in sharp contrast with Jim's tram crossing as an adult, when the "train flashed through never-ending miles of...