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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Antonia, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Immigrant Experience
Friendship
The Prairie
The Past
Innocence and Maturity
Gender
Summary
Analysis
An unnamed narrator begins the novel. She says that she grew up with Jim, the story's protagonist, in Nebraska. Now they both live in New York but do not see each other often. Jim is a lawyer for a railroad and travels often. He's married, the narrator says, but does not get along well with his wife, who leads her own life as a socialite, independent of Jim.
The introduction is a "frame" that presents the novel as a series of memories from the unnamed narrator's point of view. The frame also introduces Jim as a practical and successful lawyer who lacks love and connection in his life.
Themes
Literary Devices
The narrator says that she ran into Jim again last summer on a train in Iowa. Jim kept bringing up Ántonia, an immigrant Bohemian girl whom they both knew in Nebraska when they were young. Months later, Jim brings the narrator a manuscript he has written, called Ántonia. But in the narrator's office, Jim changes the title to My Ántonia, which is the story that follows.
