Behind the Scenes: the Lobster

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Recommended: Ethical dilemma about animal rights

David Foster Wallace, and award winning novelist, student of Harvard University, essayist, and professor, is the author of “Consider the Lobster,” which is an essay that was posted in Gourmet Magazine in 2004. This essay observes the yearly Maine Lobster Festival and explains how it can and possibly is a violation of animal rights, but more specifically , lobster rights. The article has a very broad audience, which can include animal right activists, gourmet food eaters, lobster hunters, chefs, scientists, tourists who want to know about the festival, magazine readers, and even people who eat food. This is because of the fact that all of these people tie in together with eating or cooking lobster, which is the main idea of the annual festival. The class can be lower or middle class, for the people who catch and cook lobster, as well as upper class for the scientists and gourmet eaters who may eat lobster daily without knowing how they are killed. As Wallace goes more in depth with his thoughts and findings, he grasps the readers attention by mostly using footnotes, pathos, and makes the readers think about the questions he asks order to keep them informed and thinking to help process his thoughts about the Maine Lobster festival, lobster killing, and animal rights as a whole.
On every page of the article, there are footnotes at the bottom of the page, telling more of a story than actually giving definitions or clarifying things that may be confusing to the reader. Wallce uses this common technique very uniquely, automatically grabbing the readers attention just by using more footnotes than the common author.Some of the footnotes are not just facts, but are even stories or opinions of that he wrote. One example may be, “1. There’s...

... middle of paper ...

...ience understands more, they will begin to realize what goes on behind the scenes of the lobster festival, which may make them change their minds about lobster forever and start saving the lives of lobster and and start saving the lives of lobster by reducing or stopping completely the amount of lobster they may eat.

Works Cited
Dukes, Jesse. "Consider The Lobstermen: Boom And Bust In Maine's Last Great
Fishery." Virginia Quarterly Review 87.3 (2011): 34­59. MasterFILE Elite. Web. 11 Nov.
2013.
Grabowski, Jonathan H., et al. "The Role Of Food Limitation In Lobster Population Dynamics In
Coastal Maine, United States, And New Brunswick, Canada." New Zealand Journal Of
Marine & Freshwater Research 43.1 (2009): 185. Publisher Provided Full Text Searching
File. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.
Wallace, David F. "Consider the Lobster." Gourmet. Gourmet, Aug. 2004. Web. 17 Nov. 2013.

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