How to write the AP English Literature literary argument essay

This passage was written for this course. It is from a novel set in a farming town in western Minnesota. The narrator, an adult looking back, recalls a winter night when she was sixteen.

My father had two voices, and for most of my childhood I believed the second one was the true one. The first came out of the kitchen radio at eleven every night, warm and unhurried, telling eleven hundred square miles of farmland that the roads were drifting shut near Ardell and that somebody's Holsteins had gotten loose on County 9. The second was the one he used at breakfast, when he used one at all: "Salt." "Coat." "Bus." My mother said he spent all his words at work. I took that to mean he had none left over for us, and I was sixteen before it occurred to me to wonder whom he was saving them for.

The station was a cinderblock building on a rise two miles out of town, with a tower behind it that blinked red all night like something trying to stay awake. KDLR, the Voice of the Valley, though there was no valley, only fields so flat that in winter you could watch the headlights of a single car for twenty minutes before it reached you. In February of 1984 the owner, a man in Fargo my father had met twice, sent a letter explaining that the overnight hours would now be handled by a satellite feed. It would play music chosen in Denver and read weather written in Omaha, and it would never need to be paid. My father read the letter at the kitchen table, folded it in thirds, and put it in his shirt pocket, where it stayed for two weeks, getting softer.

On his last night he asked me to come along. He did not say why, and I did not ask, because asking him things was like knocking on a frozen pond: you heard your own knuckles and nothing else.

The studio was smaller than I had imagined and smelled of burnt coffee and dust cooking on warm tubes. There was a board of switches, two turntables, and a microphone on a metal arm that he swung toward himself the way you would pull out a chair for a guest. Taped above the board was a list in his square handwriting, names and telephone numbers, and beside one of them the note "Mrs. Aune, insulin, check Tues." I asked what it was. "People who listen," he said, which was not an answer, and then he put on his headphones and became someone else.

I had heard him on the radio my whole life, but I had never watched him do it. He leaned toward the microphone as if it were an old man who was hard of hearing. He smiled at it. Between records he told the dark that the Svendsen boy had made the honor roll at the agricultural school, that the Lutheran church still needed pies for Sunday, that Highway 75 was glare ice past the elevator and nobody had any business on it who didn't have to be. He said "folks" and "friends," and once, reading a request, "sweetheart," and he did not look at me, and I understood that it was not meant for me. Mrs. Aune called at a quarter past one to say her furnace was making the noise again. He told her, on the air, which knob to turn, and waited, and she said it had stopped, and he said, "There you go, Ruth. Now get some sleep." I had never heard him say anyone's first name like that, not even my mother's.

At five minutes to six he read the weather one last time, slowly, town by town, as if he were calling roll. Then, instead of the last record, he reached over and pressed the button that shut off his microphone, and for nine seconds (I counted; I was a counting kind of girl) the whole valley that was not a valley heard nothing at all. Then the satellite came on, a woman's voice from Denver, bright as a new appliance, wishing a good morning to no town in particular.

He took off his headphones and hung them on their hook, carefully, the way you would hang up somebody else's coat. On the drive home the sun came up behind us, and the fields went from gray to pink to the plain white they would be all day. I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell him that I had heard. But he had already gone back to his other voice, the one with no words in it, and I was my father's daughter, and I said nothing, too.