If your ideal novel ends with a ride off into the sunset, well, O Pioneers! might just be the book for you. In the end, Alexandra makes plans to marry Carl, her childhood sweetheart, and they decide to leave the Divide together and head further west, to Alaska. It's been a difficult journey, but Alexandra seems to have discovered herself and found true fulfillment at last.
Not So Fast
Alexandra leaves the Divide, but knows she'll be back after the season is over in Alaska. "There is great peace here," she tells Carl, speaking about her home country, "and freedom" (5.3.21). Alexandra realizes that she belongs on the Divide, not just because she is part of it, but because she truly loves it. At the same time, she doesn't claim to own the land; it "belongs to the future," to the next generation that will come to love and understand it (5.3.25).
If we look closely, we'll see that Alexandra is making some pretty important realizations about her free will. Up until this point, we've known Alexandra to be a strong and independent woman, but one who has spent her whole life working at the expense of satisfying her own desires. She has felt inseparable from the land itself; "Our lives are like the years," she tells Carl when he first returns to the Divide, "all made up of weather and crops and cows" (2.6.6). She admits to Carl that she would rather have the freedom he has had as a city man, than all her land (2.4.12).
In the end, she realizes that she has been free the whole time. She didn't need to go anywhere! Alexandra finally overcomes the sense that she has given herself up to the land, and realizes that her sense of belonging to the Divide is more precious than anything else. Knowing her place in the world gives her more freedom to realize herself than anything else.
Into the Future
Or does it? Let's check out the final sentence of the novel:
Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth! (5.3.31)
Here, the narrator waxes poetic about the "fortunate" land that will one day absorb Alexandra back into its "bosom." Hey, don't get the wrong idea. All this image suggests is that Alexandra's "heart" will live on in the spirit of the land: "in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!" While Alexandra finally finds freedom in her sense of belonging to the Divide, the last lines imply that her personal freedom is short-lived when compared to the free spirit of the land, to which she'll soon return.