Consider The Lobster By David Foster Wallace Summary

Considering the Lobster The editors of Gourmet Magazine were able to reel in the much sought after author David Foster Wallace to chronicle the events of the Maine Lobster Festival. The editors were expecting an essay about the summer festival that would provoke mouthwatering reactions from the readers of the magazine. Instead, Wallace saturates his essay with sarcasm while, to please his editors, still being able to build a shell around a subliminally satirical message. While using a sarcastic and satirical tone, David Foster Wallace is able to construct on argument that America is ignoring morals as they dine. To his editors, David Foster Wallace was to create a fantastic aura around the Maine Lobster Festival to the readers of Gourmet

With his use of satire, Wallace also uses irony. In the essay, “Consider the Lobster”, Wallace uses these two devices as they seemingly build off of each other to build up the wall that he is building between his apparently gracious recounting of his visit to the Maine Lobster Festival and his true argument towards the morals of American dining. When he uses satire, he is implying how ridiculous the investment put into the festival by the visitors is. He explains the anatomy of the lobster and how complex it is but then goes on to explain the ease in which the festival planners are killing them with. By doing this, Wallace is ridiculing the undermining of the creature that the festival is supposed to be celebrating. Also, Wallace mentions how mistreated the lobsters are by explaining that he was watching the “...fresh caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach…” (Wallace 64). By using satire loaded words such as “hobbled”, “huddle” and “scrabble frantically”, Wallace is able to connect with his audience because they are able to relate to lobster’s fear and feel how they feel as they scramble around the tank in

The lobsters are complex creatures, as David Foster Wallace explains in the essay, and the people that are going to the festival are making this complex creature so easy to kill. Wallace is able to validate this argument by using their complexity of life and the simplicity of their death to show the paradox that the festival has created explaining, “Taxonomically speaking, a lobster is a marine crustacean of the family Homaridae, characterized by five pairs of jointed legs, the first pair terminating in large pincerish claws used for subduing prey” (Wallace 55). Then later explaining, “Be apprised, though, that the Main Eating Tent’s suppers come in Styrofoam trays, and the soft drinks are iceless and flat” (Wallace 55). This paradox that Wallace brings to the attention to his audience show that these articulate and graceful creatures are being disgraced by the festival goers by being served on Styrofoam trays and served with unappealing beverages. It is no coincidence that two things that are really explained is the anatomy of the lobster and how complex the makeup of the lifeform is and the simplicity of the death of the lobster. By explaining these two things in depth, he is able to show how ridiculous and unfair he feels that killing and eating the lobster is. Wallace also humanizes the lobster to bring the situation into a perspective that