Consider The Lobster By David Foster Wallace Analysis

Not an oyster bought from the reputable market, no Paul Greenberg ate an oyster he harvested himself from the shore of a Bronx outlet. In 2005, the United States imported nearly twice as much seafood as twenty years earlier. During that same time American seafood exports have quadrupled. Our narrator's travels took him to New York’s Jamaica Bay, Vietnam, to the Gulf of Mexico, and to Alaska’s Bristol Bay. During his trials Greenberg dove, he observed the effect of the BP oil spill on bayou country, he watched the salmon runs in Alaska threatened by a copper-mine, and played with shrimp in mangrove

In his essay Consider the Lobster, it’s apparent what David Foster Wallace is trying to tell his audience: we should really think about the lobster’s point of view before cooking and eating it. Wallace uses multiple rhetorical strategies to get his point across, including pathos and ethos. His essay is very good in how it gets its point across, and how it forces even the largest lobster consumers to truly contemplate how the lobster might react being boiled alive. It brings up many controversial topics of animal rights that many people tend to avoid, especially people who are major carnivores. Wallace’s use of rhetorical strategies really gets the reader thinking, and thoroughly captures the argument of many vegetarians against the consumption of animals. Wallace captures the use of pathos in his essay and uses it in a way that is incredibly convincing to the reader. For example, he compares the Maine Lobster Festival to how a Nebraska Beef Festival could be, stating, “at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there…” (Wallace 700). Playing off of people’s natural tendency to feel bad for the cattle, he shows that the killing of lobster is, in reality, no different than the killing of cattle, but we treat it much differently. We tend to think that lobsters are different because they are less human than cows are, and, maybe to make us feel better about our senseless killing of an animal,

Throughout the chapter, Bourdain mentions listening to songs such as “House of the Rising Sun”, “Whiter Shade of Pale”, and “These Boots Were Made for Walking” and watching films such as Boeing Boeing (393, 397). He mentions these songs in order to set the time period in the 60s for the audience and connect them to the experience. He then tells the story of eating his first oyster, calling it “the proudest moment of my young life,” he claims (398). He discusses how his family seemed disgusted by the oyster, but he enjoyed it. Bourdain allows the reader to see this moment in his life in order to show the exact time that he truly realized that “food had power” (399). Bourdain’s use of his childhood memories connects the reader to the reason why and how he came to love food.

In the documentary “Blackfish”, directed by Gabriela Cowperthawaite in 2013, is asking the audience to take up a position on the inhumane treatment of whales in captivity. In particular, she invites us to feel sympathy for the whales and anger toward SeaWorld cruelty and denial of culpability. Cowperthawaite makes choices of visual image, language, sound and structure achieve her outstanding outcomes.

He writes: “The lobster will sometimes cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof.” This imagery uses a simile that horrifies the readers because it lets the readers feel like that they are the lobsters, and they are being cooked. Wallace uses this sentence to place the readers in the lobsters’ position and let them experience the pain. Later on, Wallace also says: “the lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water.” By making the connection between lobsters and human, Wallace knows that this would change people’s opinion towards cooking lobsters. Connecting lobsters’ death to humans’ is an effective way of using pathos to make people think whether eating lobsters is an appropriate matter. This shows how human preferences leads to lobsters’ suffering. Wallace not only uses pathos to make the readers think whether eating lobster is the right thing to do but also uses ethos to make him more credible and thus readers will listen to his

In Jessica Harris’s “The Culinary Season of my Childhood” she peels away at the layers of how food and a food based atmosphere affected her life in a positive way. Food to her represented an extension of culture along with gatherings of family which built the basis for her cultural identity throughout her life. Harris shares various anecdotes that exemplify how certain memories regarding food as well as the varied characteristics of her cultures’ cuisine left a lasting imprint on how she began to view food and continued to proceeding forward. she stats “My family, like many others long separated from the south, raised me in ways that continued their eating traditions, so now I can head south and sop biscuits in gravy, suck chewy bits of fat from a pigs foot spattered with hot sauce, and yes’m and no’m with the best of ‘em,.” (Pg. 109 Para). Similarly, since I am Jamaican, food remains something that holds high importance in my life due to how my family prepared, flavored, and built a food-based atmosphere. They extended the same traditions from their country of origin within the new society they were thrusted into. The impact of food and how it has factors to comfort, heal, and bring people together holds high relevance in how my self-identity was shaped regarding food.

However, then he goes into the history of the lobster. He shares fact after fact about how “Maine’s earliest lobster industry was based around a dozen seaside canneries in the 1840’s” (Wallace 55), and that “the name ‘lobster’ comes from the Old English loppestre” (Wallace 55). At first these facts are interesting, but upon rereading the article one may wonder, what does this have to do with the argument? The answer is, nothing. These facts are in no way essential to adding context to Wallace’s moral argument, but rhetorically they serve the purpose to distract and retain. If right after page one Wallace started criticizing eating lobster, he runs the risk of ostracizing some of his carnivorous audience, but by just narrating and sharing facts, he delays this argument and continues to capture the interest of readers as they wonder where he is going with this.

Wallace is trying to say that he isn’t the person who is telling them what they have to do in their life, and that the persons themselves are who is supposed to make their own life how they want it to be. I think he avoids telling them what to do because he only gave examples of how a routine life can be like and for them to be conscious of the life they are in.

Throughout the article it is obvious by all the facts being used in the article to backup his argument. At times can be excessively used which can make the reader almost feel like they are not reading a magzine about food but a national geographic magazine. Which can at times bore the reader. However, for the most part his use of lothos helps support his argument. For example, Wallace says things in his article such as “ Like most arthropods … another planet ” (Wallace, 460). Wallace using these facts give inside to the audience about lobsters and where they derived from. He does this to inform his audience with facts to make him seem highly knowledge on lobsters. This also helps support his argument on lobsters by using facts such as these to show that he knows what he is talking about. Another example is when the author said “Lobsters tend to be hungriest and most active (i.e., most trappable) at summer water temperatures of 45- 50 degrees” (Wallace, 462). Once again the author uses logos and gives his audience more information about lobster. The quote also is another use of imagery which helps create a image inside the readers head of the pain and suffering lobsters go through that helps support the authors argument that lobsters can possibly feels

5) What do you think Gilbert meant when he said he “turned vegetarian because I realized that the meat I was eating represented so much of the

A short parable comprises the opening paragraph of Wallace’s speech. In this, there are two fish swimming along when they pass an older fish, headed in the opposite direction, that asks them how the water is. The two fish continue along for a bit before one asks the other “what the hell is water?” This serves as an extended metaphor used by Wallace to demonstrate his main argument for awareness in life. Just as the fish do not consider their surroundings, people more often than not fail to consider

According to Scruton, “Eating animals has become a test case for moral theory in Western societies,” and he believes that a moral life is set on three pillars: virtue, duty, value piety. Foer uses fishes and dogs, for example, in Eating Animals: people slam gaffs into fish, but no one in their right mind would do such a thing to a dog. Foer also mentions that fish are out there in the water doing what fish do, and dogs are with us. Dogs are our companions, and with that, we care about the things that are near and dear to us. In, “Consider the Lobster,” Wallace asks, “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” Is it a personal choice to do so? PETA, of course, says no. Dick from the Maine Lobster Festival (MLF) argues that lobsters do not have the part of the brain that receives pain, which is a false statement anyhow. Goodrich (1969) says that a human’s life is worth so much more than an animal’s life. No matter how many animals there are, one human life is worth more.

In the essay “Consider the Lobster”, David Foster Wallace communicates his experience in the Main Lobster Festival as a writer for a food magazine called “Gourmet”. In this essay, he explores the impact the festival had on him as he tries to question the morals of eating lobsters. Wallace initially makes it seem as the festival is a place of fun and celebration as he describes the entertainment: concerts, carnival rides, lobster-themed food, lobster-themed clothes, and lobster-themed toys (50). In spite of that, he changes his attitude as he observes that the festival is actually promoting cruelty to animals and holds a long discussion whether or not lobsters can actually feel pain. Through the use of his language and description, Wallace convinces the audience as he claims to persuade the reader to stop eating lobsters, but he doesn’t explicitly say so at any point in the essay.

Wallace’s use of changing viewpoints adds to what he originally wants to do, which is to give the reader a chance to pick which side of the argument they want to be on. The author not only gives the reader different views, but he also changes his tone throughout the piece. By adding dynamic shifts in his writing, he includes the reader and gives a better feel for what this article is really about. This sentence stands out due to the fact that Wallace talks about the positive aspects of what occurs during the festival throughout the beginning of the article. This includes not only the amount of lobster that is being

Unfortunately, the words themselves are not a perfect fit for the duality of the readership. For our purposes, we will say that most of the Gourmet readers are probably in the “optimist” crowd, but they are also the omnivores typical of the Standard American Diet: they will eat anything so long as it is expertly prepared and tasty. The “pessimists” are the segment of Wallace’s readership who are actually most receptive to his arguments. The reasons behind any particular reader’s membership in this group are numerous: the reader may be a vegetarian, or opposed to the typical method of lobster preparation, or may just be opposed to commercial fishing and/or commercialized food festivals. The specific reasons are not important; what is important is that Wallace does not have to fight to keep this audience: he just has to keep from alienating them. It is the optimists for whom he must fight.