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The Immigrant Experience
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Antonia, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
In the mid to late 1800s on the American prairie, friendship with neighbors was important to every family's survival and wellbeing. Neighbors provided both a social outlet and the physical help necessary for survival. The Burdens befriend the Shimerdas, the Shimerdas befriend Peter and Pavel, and Jim befriends Jake and Otto. Yet it's Jim's friendship with Ántonia, with its many ups and downs, that is central to My Ántonia. The novel begins with their pure and simple childhood friendship, and follows their many separations and reunions as they grow up. Through it all, both characters remain loyal to the memories of their childhood, and in doing so they preserve an allegiance to each other.
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Friendship ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Friendship appears in each chapter of My Antonia. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Friendship Quotes in My Antonia
Below you will find the important quotes in My Antonia related to the theme of Friendship.
Book 1, Chapter 7
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This was enough for Ántonia. She liked me better from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again. I had killed a big snake – I was now a big fellow.
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Book 1, Chapter 10
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I never forgot the strange taste; though it was many years before I knew that those little brown shavings, which the Shimerdas had brought so far and treasured so jealously, were dried mushrooms. They had been gathered, probably, in some deep Bohemian forest...
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Book 1, Chapter 19
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"Why aren't you always nice like this, Tony?" "How nice?"
"Why, just like this; like yourself. Why do you all the time try to be like Ambrosch?"
She put her arms under her head and lay back, looking up at the sky. "If I live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us."
"Why, just like this; like yourself. Why do you all the time try to be like Ambrosch?"
She put her arms under her head and lay back, looking up at the sky. "If I live here, like you, that is different. Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us."
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Book 2, Chapter 8
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Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
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Book 4, Chapter 1
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I was bitterly disappointed in her [Ántonia]. I could not forgive her for becoming an object of pity, while Lena Lingard, for whom people had always foretold trouble, was now the leading dressmaker of Lincoln, much respected in Black Hawk.
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Book 4, Chapter 4
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As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.
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Book 5, Chapter 1
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In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer: Ántonia kicking her bare legs against the sides of my pony when we came home in triumph with our snake; Ántonia in her black shawl and fur cap, as she stood by her father's grave in the snowstorm; Ántonia coming in with her work-team along the evening sky.
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Book 5, Chapter 3
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For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
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