Summary Of The Horizontal World By Debra Marquart

In Debra Marquart’s “The Horizontal World”, she vividly expresses what hails from North Dakota. She starts off by giving simplistic imagery to start a scene. Then she transitions her image of the lonely road to everything that hails from her home state. Her characterizing her home shows a bit of insight as t what happened there and how it came to be. Debra uses imagery and emotional appeal; to characterize North Dakota. She starts off by explaining the lonely and dead like road, saying how drivers do not have to touch the steering wheel in order to drive the I-94 road. She wants to give her readers an idea of what North Dakota is like, since not much of the state is truly expressed. Debra’s use of imagery is to give readers, in a sense, an “inside scoop” of North Dakota. She primarily switched back and forth between painting an image and explaining the “tragedies” happening from her home’s point of view. Debra points out how all of these actresses that are “blond, fresh-faced, and midwestern makes their descent into ruthless behavior in places like Los Angeles and New York all the more tragic” explaining that the once innocent actresses are corrupted outside of North Dakota (Horizontal World). The tone in this line seems

She goes way back in time to provide context for the land that was deemed “uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for subsistence” which is what North Dakota has become. Edwin James, from the 1820s, had declared the land to be in terrible shape even though it was a farmable plain.since the declared the land to be unfit for cultivation, the land and its inhabitants, farmers, have struggled in trying to recover. Debra then states that, “the place was a mess, and it became a young nation’s job to fix it with geometry, democracy, seeds, steam, and water” which expresses the reform that happened that fixed North