Compares "Araby" by James Joyce, and "My Antonia" by Willa cather

Lesson in Adolescence My Antonia and "Araby", two different stories that have many compelling ties. Araby and My Antonia are connected in that they both deal with relationships and a person's desires. Although they both have strong characters that reveal many human attributes, they both have their differences. In the following, James Joyce's character in "Araby" and Jim Burden in Will Cather's My Antonia will be examined. To begin, the young boy in "Araby" was …

…to visit more often and to keep Ántonia in his life. This decision implies that, by revisiting his past, Jim has learned to incorporate it into his present, to seek a real relationship with Ántonia rather than transform her into a symbol of the past in his own mind. The past, the novel seems to suggest, is unrecoverable, but the people who shared one's past can be recovered, even after a separation of many years.