Choose a descriptive passage from My Antonia. Discuss the techniques that Cather uses to make the descriptions interesting and vivid.

You'll want to pick a passage or two that you personally
find "interesting and vivid," but I hope that I can help get you started by talking
about what passages I would pick.

While many people might
focus on Cather's descriptions of the landscape, I would probably focus on the
descriptions of the rattlesnake in Chapter 7:

readability="19">

I whirled round, and there, on one of those dry
gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. ... When I turned, he was lying in
long loose waves, like a letter `W.' He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not
merely a big snake, I thought--he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity,
his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my leg, and looked
as if millstones couldn't crush the disgusting vitality out of him. He lifted his
hideous little head, and
rattled.

and

readability="16">

My big rattler was old, and had led too easy a
life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there for years, with a fat
prairie-dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it, a sheltered home, even an
owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that the world doesn't owe rattlers a
living. ... So in reality it was a mock adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance,
as it probably was for many a dragon-slayer. I had been adequately armed by Russian
Peter; the snake was old and lazy; and I had Antonia beside me, to appreciate and
admire.

I like these
descriptions of the rattlesnake because they show two very different ways of looking at
the same creature. The first description (from the moment the contact with the snake
occurs) emphasizes monstrosity, perhaps even uses vaguely sexual language, and the
second (from a much later moment, when reason has replaced excitement) emphasis a sort
of helplessness of the snake.

Another description that
intrigues me everytime I read the novel is that of the conductor in Chapter
1:

Beyond
Chicago we were under the protection of a friendly passenger conductor, who knew all
about the country to which we were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange
for our confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been almost
everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of distant states and
cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he
belonged. Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more
inscribed than an Egyptian
obelisk.

He is a sort of
magical figure, a guardian or guide for Jim as the boy journeys into an entirely new
world.