Ivar Character sketch

PAPER #1: O PIONEERS

In Willa Cather’s novel, O Pioneers, she tells the story of lives that were played out in the early part of American history. She created a character that was odd by nature, but brought an abundance of life to the novel. His name was Ivar, but was referred to, by many, as “Crazy Ivar.” Ivar was a deeply religious and slightly imbalanced elderly man. He had no faith in the civilization he was living in and behaved peculiarly around the people who lived there. He had an intrinsic understanding of nature and animals and thus became Alexandra's devoted servant. Ivar was a complex character who was a disheveled, non-conformist, who lived a life outside the norm. Was he a simply a perplex man or was he, in fact, crazy?
We first learn of Ivar in Part I. Six months after the death of Alexandra’s father, her and her two brothers took an outing to the nearby cave-home of Ivar. This is where we find our first contradiction. Ivar was an elderly man, who ...