“The Forgotten Reaping-Hook: Sex in My Àntonia” by Blanche Gelfant explains in vigorous detail why Jim Burden, from the novel My Àntonia by Willa Cather, is an unreliable narrator. She also states that the novel, along with other Willa Cather novels, involves the reluctance of characters to involve in sexual and physical relations. Gelfant uses Jim’s unwillingness to accept change and she ties this in with her idea of Jim being an unreliable narrator. Gelfant views Jim as a “self-deluded narrator” (Gelfant. p 60) in the novel because he often remembers events how he wants to recount them, not how they actually happened. He also forgets things as often as he remembers them. “Jim’s account of both history and himself seems to me disingenuous, indeed, suspect; yet it is for this very reason highly pertinent to an understanding of our own uses of the past” (p. 63) Gelfant uses Jim as an example as to why we cannot trust our own memories because Jim admitted at the beginning of the novel that he did not remember everything and that he only wrote down what he remembered. Jim’s admission, in Gelfand’s opinion, proves that he only remembered what he wanted to and some of the details from the novel were either changed in his mind or on paper. This directly adds to her stance that Jim is an unreliable narrator because although Jim cannot remember everything, he also does not remember certain things correctly. “Some memories are realities, are better than anything that could ever happen to one again” Gelfant uses Jim’s quote as an example of how he is stuck in the past and cannot accept the ever-changing future(p. 64). “He remains finally fixated on the past, returning to the vast and ineffaceable image that dominates his memories” She addresses the quote from the novel as proof that Jim refuses to accept the present and future and would rather dwell and recount his past (p. 64). Gelfant analyzes Jim’s failed r