The strangest thing about Willa Cather's My Antonia

When you get right down to it, the strangest thing about Willa Cather's "My Antonia" is that the narrator, Jim Burden, has absolutely no feelings about losing his parents when he was 10: the novel begins (after the short frame-setting preface) with Jim, a 10-year-old boy from Virginia, whose parents both died "within the year," I think is how he puts it, and he's sent, with a fellow who worked for his parents on their Virginia farm (?) half-way across the country to live with his grandparents on a farm on the Nebraska prairie. Never at any point in the novel, to my recollection, does he express any thoughts about his parents or any feelings about missing them, about being lonely, isolated, abandoned, anything. This blankness in his heart helps understand or unravel his confused feelings toward Antonia at the end of the novel: the next-to-last section concludes with Jim's visiting Antonia, after he's finished college and is about to enter law school, and she's an unwed mother working on a very isolated prairie farm: their lives are obviously going in completely opposite directions. Their reunion is in "silence and tears," as Jim notes (quoting Byron, according to a footnote), and he says he always wanted her as a sweetheart, wife, mother - and that she will always be part of his life. The telling word there is: mother - that's what he's really wanted from Antonia, whether he understands this or not. This feeling becomes more open and apparent in the last section, Cusak's Boys (?), when Jim 20 years later visits Antonia on her farm - he feels bad about staying away for so many years - he wants her in his life forever, but he just doesn't want to be with her, apparently - the novel's odd avoidance of sexuality ? - but when he sees her all his affections for her reignite - but in a very pristine and asexual manner - because she's married, a strong and busy farm wife, with a brood of I think 11 children - all of them lively and helpful- the family is quite a team. In some ways it's a pastoral ideal - but Cather, with her characteristic tough-mindedness, makes sure we also see the hardships and difficulties of prairie life: when Jim arrives on the farm, the boys are lamenting the death of one of their dogs - but then life moves on, there are chores to do. The novel ends with this grand and idealized version or vision of Antonia: Jim doesn't want "His" Antonia as an object of sex or desire, he wants his mother.