Nature's Influence on the Central Characters of My Antoia - Research Paper Example

In other words, Nature or environment appears to be both the reflector and the reflected of human psychology and, to a great extent, nature also seems to symbolize different traits of the central characters. The narrator’s contact with Nature as well as his portrayal of it, in the first place, invokes a nostalgic tone that pervades throughout the whole plot of the novel. In a sense, Jim’s nostalgic recollection of the past is his in-depth exploration of other characters’ relationship with the environment they live in.

Nature has an overwhelming influence on Jim’s life from the beginning of his childhood in the Nebraska frontier. He recollects, “Between that earth and that sky, I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.” (Cather 52) Nature’s vastness rather invokes the existential angst in his mind. Jim’s self-perception of being a small part of a vast universe, indeed, adds to the melancholy of recalling the past. He becomes overwhelmed by this vastness and fails to pray since he feels that his prayer may go unheard.

Such angst evolves from the perception of being tied to the fate of a vast universe of which he -in general, a man- is a part, a mere trivial existence. Obviously in this world, Jim feels that “what would be” cannot be changed. Yet in the novel, Nature serves as a source of inspiration and enthusiasm. In the man-nature relationship, nature’s role is two-folds. On one hand, it reflects the characters’ psychological and emotional constructs; on the other hand, it also tends to shape their emotional state.

Unlike Jim’s timid presence amid the vastness of Nature, the river serves as a symbol of freedom, which makes him feel free and enthusiastic. Again this very vastness of nature which evokes Jim’s angst provokes Antonia to build a harmonious relationship with it. Referring to Antonia’s relationship with Nebraska’s plain Carol Leavitt Altieri comments, “Cather’s protagonist possesses the imagination and ideas to seek a more hopeful destiny in an unfamiliar territory through coping with hardships and stoically overcoming many of them.” (2) Indeed Jim’s angst appears to be in conflict with Antonia’s perception of the Nature and the universe.

This dual influence of nature on the characters ultimately reveals Cather’s philosophy that Nature is as it is. Different personalities and psychologies reflect it differently. In opposition to the river’s power to shape Jim’s emotional state, the sunset rather reflects his introspective loneliness, as it is evident in the following lines: “There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky….the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth.

The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.” (Cather 79) Apart from capturing Jim’s introspective loneliness and nostalgia, the event of the sunset hails nature’s superiority in the man-nature relationship. Both “the forgotten plough” and “its own littleness” remind the readers of the temporariness of man as well his efforts. This temporariness is indeed man’s incompleteness from which unhappiness evolves.

Near the beginning of the novel, Jim explains that