Commentary of the Introduction of My Antonia.

Willa Cather was born in 1873. She came to Red Cloud, Nebraska, when she was 9 years old and spent her childhood there. Then, she moved on New-York to continue her career : she wanted to be a writer. She decided to write about her childhood in the West. The novel she wrote with this idea is My Antonia. My Antonia is a five-book novel published is 1918. The extract under study is the introduction of novel.

To begin, I will do a summary of the introduction. Then, I will do a third-part commentary. I will first deal with the regionalism. In a second part, I will explain the link between the author, the narrator and the editor. Finally, I will put the stress on the parallelism between Jim Burden and Willa Cather. The Summary :
The first-person introduction is written in the voice of a childhood friend of Jim Burden, who is the narrator for the remainder of the novel. The anonymous speaker in this introduction tells us that last summer, he unexpectedly met his friend on a train and that they spent the journey reminding about their childhood in Nebraska. It is hot and dusty on the train, and it reminds them of the weather growing up on the frontier.
According to the speaker, Jim Burden now works for the railroad in New York and is unhappily married to a dull woman.
That day on the train, they talk about a girl they both knew : Ántonia. For both of them, she symbolizes their childhood on the frontier. He tells the speaker that he has been recording his memories of the girl, and a few months later, he brings a folder containing his writing to the speaker. Jim gives the folder to the speaker.
I. Regionalism

I will first give a brief definition of the regionalism. Regionalism is a literary movement which consists in talking about his past in the land.
Willa Cather is regionalist because she writes about her childhood in the border. This is the frontier between the land that have been conquered by humans and