My Ántonia

When I was walking home with Frances, after we had left Mrs. Harling at her gate, she said simply, "You know, of course, about poor Ántonia." Poor Ántonia! Everyone would be saying that now, I thought bitterly. I replied that grandmother had written me how Ántonia went away to marry Larry Donovan at some place where he was working; that he had deserted her, and that there was now a baby.

Memory-arc architecture—childhood on the Divide, Black Hawk adolescence, Harvard exile, return to Ántonia's farm—makes plot recollection rather than conflict, with what persists as the narrative interest, so plot scores 84.

She wore the boots her father had so thoughtfully taken off before he shot himself, and his old fur cap. Her outgrown cotton dress switched about her calves, over the boot-tops. She kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her arms and throat were burned as brown as a sailor's.

Ántonia the life-force, Jim the remembering narrator, Mr Shimerda, Lena Lingard, Tiny Soderball, and Cuzak are each an immigrant or native variant on prairie survival, so cast scores 91.

We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch-charm, and for me a "Life of Jesse James," which I remember as one of the most satisfactory books I have ever read.

Five-book structure with pastoral dilation in Book I and social expansion in Book II; Harvard and return books compress decades following memory's selective rhythm, so pace scores 83.

Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Cather's luminous plain style—"the road of Destiny," "the precious, the incommunicable past"—weights every sentence toward landscape and loss; among the most beautiful prose in American fiction, so prose scores 94.

Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I. North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow.

The Nebraska prairie as moral and sensory universe—the red grass, sunflower roads, dugout, Black Hawk's social geography—makes landscape the book's primary character, so world scores 95.

I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska.

Book I—the train journey, Jake Marpole, first hearing of Ántonia—immediately establishes the adult remembering the child and the elegiac frame that will govern everything, so hook scores 89.

Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from "across the water" whose destination was the same as ours. "They can't any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say is 'We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.'"

The immigrant pastoral reverses the triumph narrative by making endurance, not success, the measure; Jim's male consciousness frames Ántonia's female vitality as myth rather than plot, so innov scores 88.

I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be.

The old prairie road and "Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past"—not reunion but recognition—is among the most moving closures in American literature, so ending scores 93.