One of the first things that struck me about the
novel, My Ántonia, by Willa Cather, was the author's impressive use
of imagery woven throughout the story. This answer deals with Chapter
Two.
One of my favorite passages
is:
Perhaps
the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt
motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth
itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hid, and the underneath it herds of
wile buffalo.
In this case, I
feel that the landscape's description communicates the atmosphere of the wild Nebraska
prairie. Cather creates a sense of the wild, untamed land years before this wilderness
would be tamed. When Jim first arrives, he is among settlers, "local" and foreign, who
attempt to battle nature and endure. The passage describes the motion of the landscape,
either the waving grasses, or Jim's sense of the life of the earth beneath the surface,
compared to galloping buffalo.
The second passage is also
found in Chapter Two, but deals with the landscape's description to symbolize Jim's
feelings. The details of the landscape are found in the minute details of the ground,
teeming with life, around him.
The earth was warm under me, and warm as I
crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow
squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as
still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something
that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything
more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of
something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate,
that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to
one, it comes as naturally as
sleep.
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