With progress comes success, and with success comes ambition, a force that has been around for a while. Through both good and bad (or evil) ambition our world was born and it's through ambition that we live our life today. But is it physically and mentally healthy? Yes and No. Ambition can either make or break your day for it can bring utter happiness or utter destruction. It has no size and depending on the person's aspirations or ego it can bring utter happiness or utter destruction. Impatience is also a result of ambition. But like I said before ambition is not all that bad, on the contrary it can guide one to success, which is another step to acquiring the American Dream. Ambition goes hand in hand with progress, self-reliance, and individualism, some of the tenets for an American Dream. In Willa Cather's My Antonia, Tiny Soderball showed the most in any of the other characters as being a very ambitious person. She was a Swedish immigrant who was determined to go after any aspirations that she had. Jim Burden regarded her as "Tiny Soderball was to lead the most adventurous life and to achieve the most solid worldly success" (pg 192) and that was because she was so ambitious. In the beginning, she really doesn't have an ambition for she is new town, is a foreigner who can't speak the language, and really hasn't really formulated her American Dream. As the book progresses, she begins to have an American Dream and that the start of her ambition. Towards, the end Tiny Soderball is no more the girl that " everyone said would be the end of Tiny" (pg192) because she ends up being very successful like Jim had thought. The good form of ambition was to be the outcome for Tiny Soderball.
Tiny Soderball, was the last person anyone thought would be successful. "How astonished we should have been if we could have known that her future was really to be" (pg.192) this was the expression people had once they heard of "Hired girl" Tiny Soderball.