As you work on your assignment to create a high school graduation speech writing in the voice of Jim Burden, the narrator of Willa Cather's My Antonia, you should try to demonstrate how he has learned and grown from his experiences on the prairie.
As well as a story of the farming community in Nebraska, this is also a story of Jim's coming of age and a key part of his maturation process is the way in which he begins to appreciate the simple, hard-working farm people he originally looked down upon because they were poor and dirty.
Thus in his speech, I think he would try to balance an emphasis on the importance of academic hard work of the type that got him admitted to college with an appreciation of the strength and skills of the farmers. He might also emphasize how his time in Nebraska led him to appreciate simple virtues of kindness and cheerfulness in face of scarcity and poverty.
As much of the book is concerned with the nature of the prairie itself and the way its geography forms its inhabitants, Jim should also talk about the land itself, perhaps paraphrasing his reflections in the book when he mentions talking about spending:
... one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky ... blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. ... No one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it.
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