My Ántonia has been called nostalgic and elegiac because it celebrates the past. The inscription on the title page of My Ántonia is a quotation from Virgil: 'Optima dies... prima fugit.' This sentence, meaning 'the best days are first to flee', helps incorporate all the elements of the novel I would like to discuss. It not only makes clear that Willa Cather will deal with memories of a glorious past, but also allows suitable …showed first 75 words of 1036 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1036 total…'Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.' However, Jim's memories seem to contradict his own last sentence. Full of nostalgia, Jim's memories vividly evoke the places, people, emotions of his past, and notably, Ántonia. As Jim tells his story, his gaze may sometimes be drawn away from her--Ántonia sometimes disappears for long sections--but he comes back to her with a richer sense of what she means to him.