Quote 1
During
that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning
to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had both known long
ago. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed
to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of
our childhood.
This passage from the Introduction is
the first the reader hears of Ántonia. The narrator of the Introduction,
who grew up with Jim and Ántonia in Nebraska, describes a train
ride taken with Jim many years later and details their conversation
about Ántonia. They agreed that Ántonia, more than any other person,
seemed to represent the world they had grown up in, to the point
that speaking her name evokes “people and places” and “a quiet drama
. . . in one’s brain.” This quotation is important because it establishes
that Ántonia will both evoke and symbolize the vanished past of
Jim’s childhood in Nebraska. It situates Ántonia as the central
character in Jim’s story and explains Jim’s preoccupation with her
by connecting her to his memories of the past. Finally, it establishes
Jim’s character with its implication that Jim shares the unnamed
narrator’s romantic inclination to dwell on the past and to allow
people and places to take on an extraordinarily emotional, nostalgic
significance.
