Comparing the American Dream in My Antonia, Neighbor...

The American Dream in My Antonia, Neighbor Rosicky, and 0 Pioneers! While many American immigrant narratives concentrate on the culture shock that awaits those who arrive from the more rural Old World to live in a city for the first time, Willa Cathers immigrants, often coming from urban European settings, face the vast and empty land of the plains. Guy Reynolds notes that the massive outburst of America westwards was in part powered by the explosion of immigrants through the eastern seaboard and across the continent. Ethnic diversity was at the heart of Americas drive westwards (63). The land and land ownership shape the lives of these newcomers in powerful ways, giving them an immigrant experience that is in some ways†¦show more content†¦Rosicky realizes that cities built you in from the earth itself, cemented you away from any contact with the ground. You lived in an unnatural world, like the fish in an aquarium who were probably much more comfortable than they ever were in the sea (243). He begins making plans to become a farm hand in t he west, doubtful that he would ever own his own land. His Old World experience makes this seem impossible since his people had always been workmen and nobody in his family had ever owned any land,--that belonged to a different station of life altogether (243). For Rosicky the idea of owning land really is a dream, and once he attains it he believes that to be a landless man was to be a wage-earner, a slave, all your life; to have nothing, to be nothing (247). This desire for land ownership is not greedy or materialistic on his part, however. In fact, while Rosicky does grow to see owning and being part of the land as an integral part of the American Dream, the material gains which are usually envisioned to go along with it are not important to him. As Doctor Burleigh reflects after visiting Rosicky, the Rosickys never got ahead much; maybe you couldnt enjoy your life and put it into the bank, too (236). An example of Rosickys attitude toward material possessions is reflected in another Fourth of July story. Rosickys wife, Mary, tells the story of the hot Fourth of July afternoon when her husband interrupted a busy afternoons work to