Whereas Ántonia represents the pioneer who builds an abundant, promising future from a wasteland, Jim Burden represents the established settlers who have grown complacent, superior, and rigid in their thinking. To Ántonia, the road to success in life has many possible branches; to Jim and other Black Hawk citizens, there is only one acceptable road. Jim symbolizes the pioneer gone soft.
Jim's memories of Ántonia comprise the main body of the novel. He admires her and is drawn to her in such a way that his memories of her have been burned into his mind. In the opening chapter we see him as a 10-year-old orphan, arriving for the first time in Nebraska. Although the journey pleases and excites him, he sinks into a deep depression as the wagon carrying him to his grandparents' farm bumps along through the pitch-blackness. He feels erased from existence, blotted out. Cather is revealing his keen sensitivity and is suggesting that the slate has been wiped clean, that the future is his to create, that he has no limitations. This is also implied at the end of the opening Chapter I: " . . . here, I felt, what would be would be." In the next chapter, when Jim daydreams in Grandmother Burden's garden, he feels a part of something whole: " . . . that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great."
While Jim grows up on the farm, we see him eagerly absorbing new experiences, but we also see some indications of his conventionality. For example, he is irritated with Ántonia for treating him like an inferior because she is older; he feels that he should be the dominant one — regardless of age — because he is a boy and she is a girl. After Ántonia's father's death, he disapproves of her working in the fields like a man, because it isn't feminine. Jim is upset when reality differs from his concept of the world. His attitude contrasts with Ántonia's acceptance of whatever happens as the natural course of events. Ántonia is a realist; Jim is too often a romantic idealist.
