Rhetorical Devices In Consider The Lobster

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.

David Foster Wallace wants the reader to realize that the most important and the most obvious realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Seeing what’s right in front of you can be the most difficult thing because you are always looking further and not opening your eyes to see the most obvious parts of life. Wallace is additionally trying to get the reader to tap into the real meaning of life as well as trying to move people away from their “default setting”. The opening of this speech starts out with the story of wise fish and the two young fish. After being asked about the water by the older fish, the two younger fish realize that they don’t know what water is. Fish don’t know water exists until beached;

In his article “Consider the Lobster”, David Foster Wallace uses the Maine Lobster Festival as a medium for his argument regarding the ethics of eating lobster. Wallace frames his article as a conversation just to get people thinking, but a deeper look at his rhetoric shows that he is arguing against the inhumanities of eating lobster, while doing everything he can to avoid sounding like he is taking a stance.

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 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

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.

This is after he just gets done about talking about his own thoughts on the lobsters and how it is alright if people keep eating it. Now if he is fine with people eating lobsters and wants to keep eating animals on his own time why does he spend time writing this entire essay? This essay is filled with so many sensory details that the reader can feel such as the noise of the scuttling against the boiling pot with the lobster in it. He does this on purpose to bring to light something you may not think about or brush off as nothing is actually going against your morals.

When describing working with killer whales, one of the former SeaWorld trainers uses personification to illustrate the bond human and whale shared and how it started to seem as if the whale had become like one of his children. By giving the animal the likeness of a human, the trainer was hoping that the viewer could relate the bond he shared with his animal to the bond a viewer might have between a parent and their child. The former SeaWorld trainer also successfully uses pathos in this scene. He appeals to the viewers emotions, especially to parents, by bringing in the special bond of a parent and child. The bond between a parent and their child is one of the strongest bonds one will experience in a lifetime and it is also one of the bonds that we have all experienced. Not everyone may have felt the bonds of friendship and love, but everyone is either a parent or a child. As a result, the viewer is able understand the feeling of the trainers, who have been around and worked with the killer whales for so long, that if feels as if the whales have become their children.

    The filmmaker practices various forms of Rhetorical devices to persuade the audience to believe that the ruling in the OSHA vs. SeaWorld case was indeed the appropriate option. Example of pathos in the documentary were when the trainers describing their time working at SeaWorld and the bond some of them had with Dawn it provides a chance for the viewers to bond with the trainers. Another example is when the fisherman, John Crowe, recollects the experience and emotions he had while capturing the baby orcas “We’re there trying to get the young orca into the stretcher and the whole famn damily is out here 25 yards away, maybe in a big line and they’re communicating back and forth, well you understand then what you’re doing, you know. I lost it. I mean I just started crying.” An example of Ethos is when the neuroscientist empathizes the intelligence of the orcas. The final device in the documentary is logos. Logos is utilized when the orca researcher, Howard Garrett, evaluate the behavior of the orcas in captivity and compare it to the orcas in the wild.

Behavioral Biologist at Edinburgh University, Victoria Braithwaite in her article, Hooked on a Myth, Published in Los Angeles Times 2006, addresses the topic of “fish have feelings”, and argues that we should adopt new ways of fishing. She supports this claim by the behavioral studies and experiments, as well as the examples and similarities the fish have with humans. She adopts a determined and passionate tone for her audience, the readers of Los Angeles Times and others interested in the topic animal justice.

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

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.

The gluttonous lords of the land capture those who are unable to defend themselves, boil the captives alive, and then feast on their flesh. Could this be the plot of some new summer blockbuster? It could be, in fact, but for now we will focus on how this depiction of events compares to David Foster Wallace’s essay, “Consider the Lobster,” which starts as a review of the Maine Lobster Festival, but soon morphs into an indictment of not only the conventions of lobster preparation, but also the entire idea of having an animal killed for one’s own consumption. Wallace shows great skill in establishing ethos. In the essay, he succeeds in snaring a receptive audience by laying out a well-baited trap for an

Many people at the Maine Lobster Festival find it easy to believe that lobsters feel no pain in order to continue to torture the animal before indulging it without empathy or regret. This ethical practice has been created in order to backup the thoughts of accepting the ideology that it 's "all right" to torture the animal before consumption. While Wallace is in a rental car he