Humankind's Relationship to the Past
             The central narrative of My Antonia is a look into the past, and though in his narration Jim rarely says anything directly about the idea of the past, the overall tone of the novel is highly nostalgic. Jim's motive for writing his story is to try to reestablish some connection between his present as a high-powered New York lawyer and his vanished past on the Nebraska prairie; in re-creating that past, the novel represents both Jim's memories and his feelings about his memories. Additionally, within the narrative itself, characters often look back longingly toward a past that they have lost, especially after Book I. Living in Black Hawk, Jim and Antonia recall their days on the farms; Lena looks back toward her life with her family; the Shimerdas and the Russians reflect on their lives in their respective home countries before they immigrated to the United States.
             The two principal qualities that the past seems to possess for most of the characters in the novel are that it is unrecoverable and that it is, in some way, preferable to the present. Antonia misses life in Bohemia just as Jim misses life in Nebraska, but neither of them can ever go back. This impossibility of return accounts for the -nostalgic, emotional tone of the story, which may have been autobiographical as well, informed by Cather's own longing for her Nebraska childhood. But if the past can never be recovered, it can never be escaped, either, and Jim is fated to go on thinking about Black Hawk long after he has left it.
             The other important characteristic of the past in My Antonia is that it is always personal: characters never look back toward bygone eras or large-scale historical conditions, but only toward the personal circumstances-places, people, things-that they remember from their own lives. As a result, a character's emotions are destined to color his or her memories for the rest of his or her
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