Death on the Prairie: Willa Cather's complete lack of sentimentality

First section - The Shimerdas - of Willa Cather's novel "My Antonia" is sorrowful and powerful, an incredibly sad and vivid conclusion as old Mr. Shimerda, completely displaced and alienated in his new land - Nebraska - drifts off to the barn and in his careful, meticulous manner, with the Old World gentility of taking off his books (so that later, daughter Antonia wears them - waste not want not) shoots himself with a shotgun - my note yesterday that My Antonia is similar in some ways to Noon Wine and to Ethan Frome confirmed here - with the sense in all three of rural poverty and espair, hard-working farmers and farm laborers unable to prosper, driven finally to death (or to a suicide attempt) - though each of these works is a unique creation and there are some real differences among them - EF the only one that's a love story - each completely gives the lie to the myth of the Golden Age of American individualism and independence: we are much better off today when we feel a responsibility as a society for the unfortunate among us. One of the great strengths of My Antonia is Cather's complete lack of sentimentality and her unconventional willingness to paint a bitter portrait of frontier life: one would expect, at least I expected, that the family of Czech immigrants, the Shimerdas, would be colorful and hard-working and that they would rise through their sufferings and hardships to become true Americans - in other words, I expected a cliche - and Cather is much more savvy and humane than I'd thought (as I should have known she'd be, having read Death Comes for the Archbishop): Mrs. Shimerda is a selfish and nasty woman, son is brutal and unkind, even the eponymous Antonia is a complex character and a bit testy at times and stubborn. We'll see how she changes and develops - as part 2, The Hired Girls, begins, the narrator, Jim Burden, moves with his grandparents into a house in town - and it becomes a locus where various country folk meet when they're in town on business or, in one case, when moving into town to find their fortune. I still am a little puzzled about the role of the narrator and what kind of relation he has or will have with Antonia, four years his senior - and wonder again why Cather felt the need for a male narrator - something I think she grew beyond in the similar, but more mature, Archbishop.