Full Answer
"My Antonia Characters: Jim Burden." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 22 Jul 2013. Web. 6 Aug 2021. Sprow, Victoria. "My Antonia Characters: Jim Burden." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 22 Jul 2013. Web. 6 Aug 2021.
Jim is not claiming ownership of Ántonia; he is indicating that the story of Ántonia contained within his memoir is just as much a product of his own mind and heart as it is of the past.
Rather than remaining close to Ántonia through the years, Jim allows himself to drift apart from her, always preserving her special place in his heart by treating her memory with greater and greater nostalgia as the years go by.
Though the final segment of the novel—Jim’s reunion with Ántonia after twenty years apart—is not presented as a staggering breakthrough, it nevertheless seems to be a great step forward in Jim’s growth and maturity.
Whereas Ántonia represents the pioneer who builds an abundant, promising future from a wasteland, Jim Burden represents the established settlers who have grown complacent, superior, and rigid in their thinking.
Over the course of the novel, Jim ages from a ten-year-old boy into a middle-aged man, and grows from a shy orphan into a successful lawyer for the railroad companies, acquiring an impressive education along the way at the University of Nebraska and Harvard.
His teacher, Gaston, takes him to Harvard with him. So Jim goes to Harvard and graduates. Then he goes to law school. Then he goes home and finds out that Ántonia has had a child out of wedlock.
Jim (and the others who use the phrase, like Mr. Shimerda) feels that Ántonia is a part of his life and he a part of hers. As he tells her at the end of the novel, "I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister – anything that a woman can be to a man.
The protagonist of My Ántonia and the narrator of most of the novel. Orphaned at the age of ten, he comes to live with his grandparents on the Nebraska prairie. Jim is reflective, studious, and a "romantic." He feels deeply connected to the land.
MY ÀNTONIA, by Willa Cather, is a story about friendship, love, and immigration. In this early-20th-century novel, Cather provides a biographical narrative of Antonia Shimerda, a character based upon Annie Pavelka, a real-life childhood friend of Cather's.
Jim is disappointed in Ántonia. He notes that everyone pities her now while everyone respects Lena. We learn that Tiny ended up conducting a lodging-house in Seattle. Jim reflects that he never knew her that well, and that she was always a little intimidating.
On the evening of his arrival, he is greeted at home by the Harlings. After Jim catches up with his family and friends, Frances brings up the subject of Ántonia. He knows that Larry Donovan never married Ántonia and that he left her with a child. Jim thinks bitterly of Ántonia's lot, lamenting her misfortunes.
NebraskaThe novel tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, and the elder daughter in a family of Bohemian immigrants, Ántonia Shimerda, who are each brought as children to be pioneers in Nebraska towards the end of the 19th century.
Shimerda was a weaver or tailor by trade and a violinist by avocation. Respected by all, he had wages and a reputation as a man of honor. The gun he gives to Jim was a present from a rich man in Bohemia who gave it to Mr. Shimerda as a gift for playing at his wedding.
Otto Fuchs is a farmhand who works for Jim's grandparents. Jim admires him as a quintessential cowboy. In this way, Otto embodies the ideals of masculinity that are lacking in the far more passive Jim. Otto is also an immigrant; he came to America from Austria.
The My Antonia quotes below are all either spoken by Jim Burden or refer to Jim Burden. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one: ).
The timeline below shows where the character Jim Burden appears in My Antonia. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Whereas Ántonia represents the pioneer who builds an abundant, promising future from a wasteland, Jim Burden represents the established settlers who have grown complacent, superior, and rigid in their thinking. To Ántonia, the road to success in life has many possible branches; to Jim and other Black Hawk citizens, there is only one acceptable road.
Later, when Jim decides to marry, he doesn't choose a wife from the hired girls; he marries a woman with both money and class. At college Jim learns a greater appreciation of the classics than he'd had at home, and he compares the people from his own childhood to people in the works of Virgil.
Jim symbolizes the pioneer gone soft. Jim's memories of Ántonia comprise the main body of the novel. He admires her and is drawn to her in such a way that his memories of her have been burned into his mind. In the opening chapter we see him as a 10-year-old orphan, arriving for the first time in Nebraska.
Jim's idealism is illustrated by his attitude toward the hired girls. He admires them and criticizes the townspeople for arrogantly looking down on them — that is, the girls are good enough for the boys of Black Hawk to have fun with, but they're not good enough to marry.
When Jim returns to Black Hawk, he sees a photograph of Ántonia's baby and longs to visit his old friend, but he initially finds it difficult to forgive her for throwing herself away on such a cheap fellow as Larry Donovan. Even now, he appears irresistibly drawn to Ántonia.
He is thrilled when the hired girls admire his graduation speech, and he agrees — if reluctantly — to stay the night at Wick Cutter's house (in place of Ántonia).
Although Jim has prospered materially, he seems spiritually empty. This emptiness in Jim's life, twenty years later, is contrasted with the fullness of Ántonia's. Ántonia has not achieved great material wealth, but her spirit is free, full, and vital, and it is as optimistic as it was when they were children.