C. Formal Analysis Essay #1
Mrs. Forrester as the American Frontier When Willa Cather wrote her novel, A Lost Lady, in 1923, she did not write it to become a feminist novel but to symbolize the loss of the frontier lifestyle of America and how everything was rapidly changing. The character of Mrs. Marian Forrester was meant to symbolize America and the frontier land. Cather does an excellent job doing this in her novel. Throughout the novel, Mrs. Forrester shows a number of ways that she was the symbol of America. The first point is that she was always indecisive on what she wanted. The second was that she was a younger woman who was lively and ended up declining in health. The last example was that she was one with all, almost in a transcendental…show more content… “Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada, pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.” (Hemingway) This quote comes from Ernest Hemingway’s short story entitled “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and was spoken by the older waiter or narrator. This short speech is meant to be a parody of “The Lord’s Prayer”, which has the line “Give us this day of our daily bread…” The Spanish word nada was also stated ad nauseam; nada in Spanish means “nothing”. Overall, there are two interpretations that I have come up with from reading this quote. The first interpretation that I thought of was maybe the old waiter/Hemingway was trying to mock the Christians and say that there is no God. To build on that, maybe Hemingway was expressing the belief that people believed in God but did not believe he was going to protect them. The second interpretation I came up with was that maybe the waiter was becoming hopeless and basically saying there is nothing to look forward to or even live for in this world. That would be the reason for all of the “nada’s”. He might be trying to say that we are praying for nothing and to
