841-18-7448 INGL 3135 Journey in Literature “Conversations are the substance of the social world…” and “every fragment of interaction construct and reconstructs [it]” (Seidmann, xxxx). Through his recollection of history, Jim Burden is My Ántonia’s architect. He designs each fragment of the story by weaving what endures in his memories in a detail saturated memoir, with its elaborate structure hinting at unshakeable truth. However, even with the apparent accuracy it poses, it is far from objective. Although readers are drawn to trust the storyteller, Jim is an unreliable narrator because his memories, aside from being the subjectively selected scraps that survived after more than twenty years, are mostly constructed from secondary sources of information and are often subject to his participation in social reality. In other words, we cannot take Jim’s narration as an objective representation of history because it is based in the unstable recollection of oral history and gossip, and it is colored by both his nostalgia and the social context fabricated by symbolic interaction. In chapter XIV of book II, Cather unveils a scene that sets the relationship Jim has with stories and, consequently, the receptors he tells them to. When the main characters go on a picnic, Antonia says “I’ve tried to tell the girls about how the Spanish first came here, like you and Charley Harling used to talk about. I’ve tried to tell them, but I leave out so much” (page 277). This can be extrapolated to Jim’s narration, since he leaves out information too, and adds as well, which eventually results in highly colored synthetic memories. For example, in the same page he explains how Charley Harling and he believed that the teachers were wrong about how far the Spanish went in North America because of a farmer’s story he heard from Mr. Harling. This can be examined as the starting point to state that Jim constructs beliefs on information that
had traveled through several people, and it is musings like this that are taken as the truth —and,
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