My Antonia Character Analysis

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My Ántonia: Living Life Tenaciously
In Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, tenacity is an integral part of living and learning in one’s life--something every young person could learn from. It is an important balance of hard work and learning from past experiences. Throughout the book, the characters grow and learn from their various life experiences. One strong theme throughout the story is opportunity. Jim and Ántonia are presented with various opportunities and, they must learn how to choose and how to balance hard work and living life joyfully. This takes tenacity. My Ántonia is the story of two characters, with very different life experiences, who were tenacious and ended up in drastically different places.
Hard work is an essential part of life, and one can get nowhere without it. In …show more content…
Having a long term goal while enjoying the small things and seizing every moment is important to a full experience of living. When jim is talking to Ántonia, he says “Some day, Tony, I am going over to your country and I’m going to the little town where you lived.” This is very telling of the type of person Jim is. He is hardworking, but yearning for knowledge and he always maintains a long term goal. At the end of the book, Jim sees that Ántonia has done precisely this. This realization sends him down a road of self reflection. Even though Jim has accomplished more and his success is greater by worldly view, Ántonia has lived a more fulfilled life. Having goals and wanting to experience more of the world than people currently have is an important part of life.
Becoming a tenacious person involves living life to the fullest, while working hard for what people want. In My Ántonia, Willa Cather uses these characters to show that the principles of delayed gratification and hard work are integral to living a full, content life. Pleasure must be balanced with labor, because too much of one would be a waste without the influence of the
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Words 731 - Pages 3