The Maine Lobster Festival

Wallace begins “Consider the Lobster” by telling the reader about the Maine Lobster Festival, which hosted over 80,000 people in 2003 and served over 25,000 pounds of lobster. He moves on to give a basic scientific description of the lobster and the history of lobster as food. Wallace then gives his firsthand account of attending the Maine Lobster Festival. He then goes into the preparation and cooking of lobster and. He finishes his piece by exploring the question of lobsters’ feelings of pain and how

Yuling Lu (Gipsy) ENGL 202B Prof. Charnesky 2/3/2015 Explication for Consider the Lobster In "Consider the Lobster", David Foster Wallace argues that the process of cooking lobsters is an issue both uncomfortable and complex.

The usage of a strong vocabulary shows cacophonous diction. Equiano uses words such as “astonishment”, “meanest”, “countenances” and “dejection”(84). This can be seen in the following situation when Equiano is below the deck it seems almost like a chamber. “This produce copious perspirations so that the air soon became unfit for respirations from a variety of loathsomeness” (87). The author’s choice to include diction clarifies his meaning because it makes emphasis on the terrible smell. Another instance of diction that implies the dreadful living conditions was the lack of food. Equiano explains “One day they had taken a number of fishes and when they had killed and satisfied themselves with as many as they thought fit, to our astonishment who were on the deck, rather than give any of them to us as we expected they tossed the remaining fish into the sea again” (87). The vivid imagery dramatizes the hunger in order to put the reader in Equiano’s shoes. All of these are specific examples of the appalling living conditions that no human should

A part of the world around him, the opinions of others is a vital means by which Hall introduces the fisherman. Immediately present in “The Ledge” is the fisherman’s relationship with his wife, “She did not want him to go. It was Christmas morning.” (369). The wife’s reluctance to see her husband leave is indicative of their relationship and the caring man that the fisherman is— she wants Christmas, a day of joy and love, to be

The tide was coming in and there was only a narrow strip of firm beach between the water and the white, stumbling stuff near the palm terrace. Ralph chose the firm strip as a path because he needed to think, and only here could he allow his feet to move without having to watch them. Suddenly, pacing by the water, he was overcome with astonishment. He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one 's waking life was spent watching one 's feet. He stopped, facing the strip; and remembering that first enthusiastic exploration as though it were part of a brighter childhood, he smiled jeeringly. He turned then and walked back toward the platform with the sun in his face. The time had come for the assembly and as he walked into the concealing splendors of the sunlight he went carefully over the points of his speech. There must be no mistake about this assembly, no chasing imaginary. . . .

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.

We first see him use this when he explains how “lobster was literally low class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized” this is an effective tool to dissuade his readers from consuming lobster (Wallace 55). When explaining how there was an “Unbelievable abundance” of lobster owing to its standing in the 1800 and how it was even regarded as “cruel and unusual” to have inmates consume lobster too often (Wallace 55). How in that time the most common way to eat lobster was preserved in a can that could have been “shipped as far away as California” (Wallace 55). It used to be a dish consumed because it was “cheap and high in protein” but has become a dish that is “the seafood analog to steak”. He uses these facts to show that for various reasons this creature that for a long time was considered repugnant and only consumed when necessary has become something desired and

But in the second part, when the tragedy happened, the author employs mainly short simple sentences to convey the shock and the state of the main characters: Gyp had bitten her. The poor child was white and rigid with shock. This technique creates an antithesis between the peaceful state at the beginning of the evening and between the atmosphere of a catastrophe later.

Maine is all about festivals. Old Port Festival is celebrated on the first weekend in June in Portland. There is a giant puppet parade and dozens of stages with live music. About 50 food vendors include sidewalk versions of some of the city’s best restaurants. KahBang is celebrated in Bangor in August. KahBang is a music, arts, film, and beer fest that also includes a TED- style conference. The Moxie festival is the largest festival that Maine has. Maine’s Moxie festival celebrates the nineteenth- century soft drink that is sold almost nowhere else in the country. The Moxie Festival is celebrated in July and there are recipe contest and chugging competitions. Maine’s Lobster Festival revolves around the world’s largest lobster cook and 20,000

Ernest Miller Hemingway is known for his unique style and theories of writing, especially the iceberg theory. In the Death of the Afternoon, Hemingway says that “The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.” (92) Simple words, vivid images, rich emotions and deep thoughts are the four basic elements of the iceberg theory. Talk about how these stories illustrate four elements of theory. In both short stories, Hemingway describes scenery and characters with simple words directly to give readers a vivid image. Under this sketch, readers can know characters’ emotion and get the theme through their imagination and analysis.

The book is littered with explanations about fishing. I admit that I frequently got lost in these passages. This knowledge is an important element of the story. When a component of the boat malfunctions, readers know the significance of this to the sailors. Without this, the book would have provided a message that only other sailors could understand. Junger, by supplying this information, wants to make sure that all readers can fully grasp the danger and suspense of the book.

“He did not truly feel good because the pain from the cord across his back had almost passed pain and into dullness that he mistrusted.”(74) Once both the fish and Santiago had reached the breaking point of conflict the story seemed to slow down in time to exemplify the adverse conditions that both characters were suffering from. The old man proves himself worthy of personal suffering with the cuts and scars on his hands and back along with all of the pulling and slipping the cords had upon his fragile body. Hemmingway shows in a big way how an out of proportioned conflict with an old fisherman and an 18 foot long marlin helps to magnify the significance of Santiago searching for his rebirth to manhood. With constant abstraction describing the fish and the sea in relation to brotherhood create interesting questions for Santiago to ponder. His rationalization for his fishing is that he was born to do it. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” (103) Hemmingway proves that this fish represents all of Santiago’s built up tension to total the size of a gigantic marlin that is perceived as devastating but not unconquerable. The old man’s hopes and aspirations can overcome the adversity of the marlin’s size, along with the conditions of the old, hungry, and exhausted fisherman. Through outright suffering Santiago achieves a goal above his previous manhood by combating pain and

The Maine Lobster Festival is located in the western part of the state and is known for their delicious lobster, lobster-type foods, and the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker. There is roughly 80,000 people that visit this festival every year because it won an award in a magazine stating it was one of the best food themed festivals in the world.

'What 's that? ' she asked a waiter and pointed to the long backbone of the great fish that was just now garbage waiting to go out with the tide. 'Tiburon, ' the waiter said, 'Shark. ' He was meaning to explain what dare grapple happened. 'I didn 't know sharks had such handsome tails. ' 'I didn 't either, ' her male companion said." (page 109) these two tourists who speak are hardly differentiated from the group to which they belong. They are all metaphors for individuals who are spectators of the human scene rather than participants in its activity. They see, but they see without fully comprehending. They are only faintly curious, only passingly interested, only superficially observing, they have not been initiated into the mysteries that Santiago understands. These tourists live their lives as tourists, skimming the surface of life, without resolution or clarity. Their life reflects that of all people who live their lives ashore, who dare not grapple with the mysteries of the ocean, or of life. This is the type of life that Hemingway always tried to avoid, to the point of his taking his own life. Hemingway uses metaphors to reflect his opinions of life and the people that he has met in life. The metaphor of the sea symbolizes all of life and the roles that people must choose to have in life. The lions are a metaphor for the

In this excerpt from the memoirs of Virginia Woolf, one can see the lasting significance this fishing trip had on Virginia Woolf’s life. The rhetorical question “-how can I convey the excitement?” paired with a majority of her diction indicate the fun she had on the trip. Not only this, but the anecdote shows the lesson Woolf’s father taught her. The words chosen to express these memories are descriptive and excitable. In this text, Virginia Woolf uses positive and expressive diction to effectively convey how her experience made a lasting impression of childhood summers in her