A writer, Debra Marquart, in her memoir about growing up in North Dakota, The Horizontal World, is a fragment that exhibits her indirect interpretation of love for the upper Midwest. Marquart’s purpose is to impress upon the readers the idea that despite being a dull and unimpressed location for certain people, it has many unknown unique qualities and can not just be found anywhere else easily. Through her usage of allusions and changing tones from beginning to the end, she is able to use juxtaposition throughout the passage to describe the two distinct perspectives about upper Midwest: the drabness in the beginning to a hopeful ending from her family history.
Marquart introduces the upper Midwest by acknowledging its lifeless and colorless lands and by implementing particular pieces of information about upper Midwest that not many people know about in it. She portrays the cruel reality of the upper Midwest as she affirms, “. . . you’ll encounter a road so lonely, treeless, and devoid of rises and curves in places that it will feel like one long-held pedal steel guitar note.” (2-5), which juxtaposed to the end of the passage where she shared how her great-grandparents and grandparents “traveled to the Midwest by train” (64-65) to receive their lands and what was the meaning of Eureka. By changing the tones about the allusion of upper Midwest as desolation to hopefulness with the help of positive connotation words such as “purity” (69) and “anticipation” (72) and the allusion of Archimedes supports her establish how different the common point of views when it comes to the Midwest and its undiscovered charm and significance. Marquart starts the passage by having the readers feel like they are in the story through the use of second person point of view. She then transitions back to the first point of view before putting a facetious fact in it: comparing Republican and tornadoes.
Builds upon on the use of allusions, Marquart also indirectly promotes the upper Midwest through the use of diction. She brags about how the “TV news anchors often hail from” the upper Midwest, and the trustworthy, “innocent female characters in movies” (16-17) are often from the area where Edwin James claimed to be “uninhabitable” (40). Marquart also refers to Wheeler when she mentions upper Midwesterns are “the folks presidents talk to” (21), which contributes to her trying to promote upper Midwest since they are important to the nation and even presidents want their opinions.
