r a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything that a woman can be to a man.'" (Cather 240) The end of the novel is also without a circle. The completion of the novel has a literal homecoming and completion of the circle. This circle is when Jim Burden goes back to the road with which the novel began, and ending as it began in the autumn of the year. An even greater importance is Jim's sense of returning to an awareness of the deep sources of his life, as symbolized in his childhood, in the land, and in Antonia. "The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is." (Cather 273) Every writer has been criticized in the past. The future will hold the same thing for them, whether it is a brutalizing and/or admoralizing pen. Willa Cather's novel, My Antonia, is one of hundreds of thousands of novels, poems, and etc. of literary works, which are criticized. The critics that criticize the novel, My Antonia, all explain the fact that the novel has a very loose structure or none at all. With that in mind they also explain that the only literary technique, which was used in the novel, that holds the whole novel together is the constant cyclical themes. These themes are the cycle of the stages of human life, the cycle of the seasons of the year, and the cycle of the cultural phases of civilization....
