In the following excerpt, Scholes compares the characters of Jim Burden and Antonia Shimerda.

The two central figures in My Antonia are, in different senses, innocents. Jim Burden, bereft of both his parents within a year, is removed from the warm and comfortable Virginia of his early days and thrust into the strange and frightening world of Nebraska. As he bumps along on the wagon ride to his new home, he feels that he has left even the spirits of his dead parents behind him:

The wagon jolted on, carrying me I know not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out I did not say my prayers that night, here, I felt, what would be would be.

Antonia Shimerda, though also a young, innocent creature in a...