Once said by writer, Debra Marquart, “Driving west from Fargo on I–94, the freeway that cuts through the state of North Dakota, 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”(Marquart 1-5). The passage is from The Horizontal World, Debra Marquart’s 2006 memoir about growing up in North Dakota. In this passage, Debra Marquart conveys her profound love for the upper Midwest region, even as it was marked as an inhabitable location for many who first approached it. Marquart characterizes the upper Midwest as an entity whose landscape is bland and yet very orderly structured. In The Horizontal World, Debra Marquart adopts the use of powerful allusions…show more content… She gives the conclusion that, “This is a region that contains both Garrison Keillor’s Lake, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average, and the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, the macabre land of murder-by-woodchipper”(Marquart 26-31). Whether validly or not, she gives two assumed propositions, each of which shares a term with the conclusion, and shares a common middle term not present in her conclusion. In the 1820s, Edwin James, the official a fictitious town in Keillor’s radio show, a Prairie Home Companion, a 1996 film produced and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen chronicler of Major Stephen Long’s survey, declared the region “a dreary plain, wholly unfit for cultivation”(Marquart 39-40), and of course, “uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for subsistence” (Marquart 40-41). Here she sets up views of others from the region for comparison to her own feelings toward the region itself. Given this point, whether valid or not, is still influential towards her writing. It gives her audience texture, yet with the possibility of being wrong, that IS why it is her opinion. Debra Marquart portrays her respect for the pole of the upper Midwest by slowing their ability to celebrate a previously labeled unimpressive land through the works of syllogism with valid yet not valid points to back it
