Introduction

Willa Cather's My Antonia begins in the voice of an unnamed narrator who "introduces" not only the novel but also Jim Burden, whose first-person narration begins with chapter one. When these two "Old friends" meet on a train crossing the plains of Iowa, they reminisce together about growing up in a small town on the Nebraska prairie, "buried in wheat and com, under stimulating extremes of climate." Both have long since moved away from the prairie to New York, but their recollections of childhood remain sharp, especially their memories of one "central figure," the "Bohemian girl" named Antonia. "To speak her name," the narrator writes, "was to call up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one's brain." The narrator challenges Jim to write down all that he can remember of Antonia, and the manuscript that he creates he calls, "My Antonia...