How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. (1.1.1)
Just about everything in this passage tells us how ramshackle life on the frontier is. The way the houses look "as if they were straying off by themselves," makes them seem less like homes and more like a herd of nomadic cattle. Little House on the Prairie? Think again.
Quote #2
The little town behind them had vanished as if it had never been, had fallen behind the swell of the prairie, and the stern frozen country received them into its bosom. The homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow. But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes. (1.1.18)
Cather's vision of prairieland is overwhelmed by the sheer fact of the flat, empty stern country. O Pioneers! might wax poetic about the Divide, but it's not exactly advertising America's "heartland."
Quote #3
The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings. (1.2.1)
This comes up again and again: all that flat, expressionless land seems to remind the narrator of a blank page, and the inhabitants of the Divide are pictured as writers leaving their "feeble scratches."