Part five, Cuzak's Boys, of My Antonia has a sad tone towards the middle of the part. When he visits Antonia and her family, Jim and her family are very happy spending time together, but it does not last, for Jim has to leave. And as Jim goes to Black Hawk, he feels very lonely and depressed. "My day in Black Hawk was disappointing. Most of my old friends were dead or had moved away. Strange children, who meant nothing to me, were playing the Harling's big yard when I passed; the mountain ash had been cut down, and only a sprouting stump was left of the tall Lombardy poplar that used to guard the gate. I hurried on." And as there is not much to do in Black Hawk anymore for Jim Burden, he walks on to the nature which has always given him joy, even as a child. Yet this time, it was not the same as it once was; it was strange and in a way desolate because it had changed. "As I wandered over those rough pastures, I had the good luck to stumble upon a bit of the first road that went from Black Hawk out to the north country; to my grandfather's farm, then on the Shimerdas' and to the Norwegian settlement…On the level land the tracks had almost disappeared—were mere shadings in the grass, and a stranger would not have noticed them…They looked like gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes where the farm wagons used to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips of the horses." Yet even with the changes, Jim still feels a sense of peace, protection, and happiness. He does this through remembering his past and all the good times he had shared with Antonia. Through all the changes and the unknown future, there was one thing that was set in stone for Antonia and Jim. "Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."
Bibliography
Cather, Willa. My Antonia. New York, New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment