Book One, for example, begins with an idyllic autumn of exploration for Jim and Ántonia it ends with a bitter winter and an unforeseen family tragedy that changes Ántonia's life forever. Instead, each book contains thematic contrasts. As Cather intended, there is no plot in the usual sense of the word. The novel comprises five sections, called "books" by the author, and may appear at first to lack a cohesive structure. Unlike Cather, Jim is an orphan joining his paternal grandparents on the Nebraska Divide. As Cather herself did, ten-year-old Jim has left Virginia for Nebraska by train and is shocked by the barren prairie on his first wagon ride. A beloved American classic, Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918) is best summarized by its epigraph: "the best days are the first to flee." In it, the adult narrator, Jim Burden, remembers his childhood through the memory of his friend, Ántonia Shimerda.
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