In Orlean’s excerpt, she uses the “Visible Cow” as a metaphor for thinking about the essay’s form and structure. Applying Orlean’s metaphor, to John McPhee’s “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” the invisible cow can be seen in McPhee’s story by closely examining his narrator and setting. McPhee’s presents us with a story which compares the game Monopoly to the real world, which brings us back to Orlean’s lines “…an essay in which the writer turns something over and over in his or her head, and in examining it finds a bit of truth about human nature and life and the experience of inhabiting this planet”(176). Not only does McPhee take the use the game Monopoly to examine the real world, he also helps the reader make connections to the game as he contrasts the difference between the world in the game and the  present reality of those same places in the world by listing historical facts and background information.

McPhee’s narrator is one that Orlean would applaud at. Orleans mentions that a writer must “be explicit, in the first person, or just implicit, as the person behind behind the words”(176)in order for the readers to be “invited deep inside someone’s mind” (176). Which is exactly what McPhee has accomplished “Go. I roll the dice-a six and a two. Through the air I move my token, the flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range”(9). He has built a narrator who dictates the story in first person, without ever revealing who they are or what they think as a character and thus allowing the reader to delve into someone else’s mind and form their own opinions.

McPhee’s form and structure throughout his context allow him to explore two different worlds at once. One where the narrator is sitting down and playing a board game of Monopoly and the other where he is able to become a part of the game walking down boulevards and avenues of the properties; “I turn on Pennsylvania, and start back towards the sea.The windows of the Hotel Astoria, on Pennsylvania near Baltic, are boarded up…”(15). His structure allows him to contrast the past and present time of these properties and give a social critique of both its people and places.This act might constrain him to become a visitor describing the scenery since he does not form any direct opinions. Compared to the other essays we have read so far McPhee’s text outlines perfectly to what our Textual Essay Rough Draft is supposed to resemble. It gives an objective like the game of monopoly and compares it  the world we live in along with a personal account of someone playing the game while imagining themselves figuratively in it, and ends with a abstract meaning about the search for a better society.