If I live here, like you, that is different.
Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us.
See Important Quotations Explained
Summary: Chapter XIV
On the second morning of the blizzard, Jim wakes to a
great commotion. When he arrives in the kitchen, his grandfather
informs him that Mr. Shimerda is dead. With Ambrosch Shimerda curled
up on a nearby bench, the Burdens quietly discuss the apparent suicide
as they eat breakfast. Jake describes Krajiek’s strange behavior
around the body and notes that Krajiek’s axe fits the gash in Mr.
Shimerda’s face. Otto Fuchs and Mrs. Burden talk him out of his
suspicions. After the meal, Otto sets out to summon the priest and
the coroner from Black Hawk, and the others clear the road for the
trip to the Shimerdas. Jim stays behind and finds himself alone.
After completing a few chores, he settles down to contemplate Mr.
Shimerda’s death. At dusk, the wagon returns, and Jake describes
the scene at the Shimerdas’ to Jim.
Summary: Chapter XV
The next day, Otto returns from Black Hawk with a young
Bohemian named Anton Jelinek. At dinner, Jelinek bemoans the fact
that no priest could be found to put Mr. Shimerda to rest. Afterward, Jelinek
goes out to clear a road to the Shimerdas’ wide enough for a wagon,
and Otto begins to construct a coffin. Later in the afternoon, a
number of other locals stop at the Burdens’ to ask after the Shimerdas
and discuss the tragedy. The coroner refrains from issuing a warrant
for Krajiek at Mr. Burden’s urging. The postmaster alerts the Burdens
that none of the graveyards in the area will accept Mr. Shimerda
because he killed himself, and Mrs. Burden lashes out in bitterness
at this unfairness. With no graveyard to turn to, the Shimerdas
decide that they will bury Mr. Shimerda on the corner of their homestead.
Summary: Chapter XVI
After lying dead in the barn for four days, Mr. Shimerda
is finally buried on his own land. Despite the beginnings of another
ominous snowfall, rural neighbors come from miles around to attend
the burial. At Mrs. Shimerda’s request, Mr. Burden says a prayer
in English for Mr. Shimerda, and afterward Otto leads the assembled group
in a hymn.
Summary: Chapter XVII
With the coming of spring, the neighbors help the Shimerdas
to build a new log house on their property, and they eventually
acquire a new windmill and some livestock. One day, after giving
an English lesson to Yulka, Jim asks Ántonia if she would like to
attend the upcoming term at the schoolhouse. Ántonia proudly refuses,
saying that she is kept too busy by farm work, but her tears of
sorrow reveal her true feelings on the matter. Jim stays at the
Shimerdas’ for supper, but he is offended by their ingratitude over
neighborly charity and by Ántonia’s coarse manners.
Summary: Chapter XVIII
Once school starts, Jim sees less and less of Ántonia,
and soon tension erupts between them. When Jake and Jim ride over
to the Shimerdas’ to collect a loaned horse collar, Ambrosch first
denies borrowing it, then returns with a badly damaged collar he
rudely gives over to them. After a heated exchange, Jake grabs Ambrosch, who
kicks him in the stomach. Jake then pounds Ambrosch on the head.
Jake and Jim quickly pull away from the Shimerdas’, as Mrs. Shimerda
yells after them about sending for the authorities.
When Mr. Burden learns of the incident, he sends Jake
into town with a ten-dollar bill to pay the assault fine. For the
next few weeks, the Shimerdas are proud and aloof when meeting the
Burdens in passing, although they maintain their respect for Mr.
Burden. Finally Mr. Burden arranges a reconciliation by hiring Ambrosch
to help with his wheat threshing and offering Ántonia a job to help Mrs.
Burden in the kitchen. In addition, he forgives Mrs. Shimerda her
debt on the milk cow she bought from him. In an effort to show her
own forgiveness, Mrs. Shimerda knits Jake a pair of socks.
Summary: Chapter XIX
In high summer, Ántonia and Jim spend more time together,
walking to the garden each morning to collect vegetables for dinner.
One night, during an electric storm in a light rain, Ántonia and
Jim climb onto the roof of the chicken house to stare at the sky
until they are called down for supper. Ántonia tells Jim that things
will be easy for him but hard for her family.
Analysis: Book I, Chapters XIV–XIX
Throughout the novel, Jim shows an extraordinary capacity
to identify with others, and, upon hearing of Mr. Shimerda’s apparent
suicide, he immediately senses that “it was homesickness that had killed
Mr. Shimerda.” As Jim imagines the homeward route of Mr. Shimerda’s
released spirit through Chicago and Virginia, two way stations on
his own journey to Nebraska, he identifies with the sense of loss
that he believes caused Mr. Shimerda such disenchantment. In meditating
on Mr. Shimerda’s life, Jim comes to feel as though his memories
almost “might have been Mr. Shimerda’s memories.”
Jim’s most concentrated struggle with cultural difference
occurs over the matter of religion. As Jake describes Ambrosch’s
view that his father has been sent to purgatory as a result of his
suicide, Jim rails against what is to him an incomprehensible stance,
saying, “I almost know it isn’t true.” But the “almost” indicates
Jim’s hesitation. Because he himself holds a belief that is mystical
(his belief in the presence of Mr. Shimerda’s soul), Jim is unable
to rule out the seemingly unsupportable beliefs of others. As he
attempts to sleep that night, Jim is crushingly preoccupied with
this unfamiliar idea of purgatory, suggesting that his confrontation
with other ways of thinking has left him uncomfortable. Although
Jim listens carefully to Anton Jelinek’s story of religious conviction
and finds it “impossible not to admire his frank, manly faith,”
there is clearly a divide between the Bohemians’ more instinctual
faith and Jim’s more philosophical spirituality.
The Nebraska prairie, as an amalgam of various immigrant groups,
is a testing ground for collisions between such differing religious
viewpoints. Mr. Shimerda’s suicide proves to be a test case for the
solidarity of the farming community. When the old-guard religions
universally refuse to have a suicide buried in their graveyards, the
Shimerdas are forced to come up with an alternative. In dismis-sing
the conservative standards of the foreign churches, Mrs. Burden
proposes “an American graveyard that will be more liberal minded.”
This American graveyard is a burial plot on the family land, accompanied
by a makeshift funeral and an improvised service conducted by the
farming community. For all of its unorthodoxy, the beauty of this
service captures Jim’s imagination, as he remarks on his affection
for “the dim superstition” of the event and the “propitiatory intent”
of the grave that remains behind it.
With Mr. Shimerda departed, the different paths that await Ántonia
and Jim begin to emerge. Structurally, this chapter concludes Book I,
the main phase of Jim and Ántonia’s relationship in the rural countryside.
The directions that they will take in life are already becoming
visible, and they begin to grow apart. Thrown into a more laborious
role on the farm, Ántonia quickly loses her feminine softness, and
Jim’s entry into school sets him off on an altogether separate road.
Interestingly, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his more formal
education, Jim fails to recognize the reality of this difference.
When he says to Ántonia that he wishes she could always be “nice”
rather than rough and tumble, she explains that “things will be
easy for you. But they will be hard for us.” Here, for the first
time, Cather clearly presents the dichotomy between Ántonia’s role
as a rural worker and Jim’s role as a leisured thinker—a dichotomy
that she explores throughout the remainder of the novel.
payment page
