We've got your back. With the Tough-O-Meter, you'll know whether to bring extra layers or Swiss army knives as you summit the literary mountain. (10 = Toughest)
(4) Base Camp
Don't get us wrong. While O Pioneers! has a straightforward plot and won't bog you down with a lot of big words or complex sentence structures, it still packs a hefty punch.
The central questions posed by this novel have to do with freedom, belonging and social norms, all of which are still thorny issues for today's American society. Sure, in an era of freeways and suburbia, the frontier lifestyle might seem like a thing of the past, but the frontier mentality still informs the way we define what makes an American. The real challenge is to read between the lines of O Pioneers!, to see how Cather portrays that mentality.