How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. (1.1.1)
How's that for an opening sentence? This immediately gives us the sense that Hanover, the town around which most of O Pioneers! takes place, is somehow at odds with its (super harsh) natural environment.
Quote #2
It was facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were to weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness. (1.1.18)
Okay, okay. We get it. Nebraska is a difficult place to live. But a passage like this one gives us some insight into the psychology of the Divide's inhabitants, in this case, Carl. In short: without a certain optimism and willingness to persevere, this country will quickly make you bitter.
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)
Here, the refusal of the land to be tamed is brought into focus with the metaphor of "markings." Hard as they might try, the inhabitants of the Divide are barely able to leave any marks of human civilization. If we understand these "markings" metaphorically, as a kind of writing, then it sounds like the inhabitants are struggling and failing to write their own history.