I love Lobster

“Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace is another self-reflection article about his trip to the Maine Lobster Festival. He begins the article by providing good background information on why the festival is so important to the midcoast region of Maine. Wallace does a good job of portraying the positive and negative aspects of the festival in order to get a full picture of the experience. One of the things I dislike about Wallace is his sometimes meticulous attention to detail. He spends a lot of time using these details, such as the “four-mile, 50-minute” cab ride from the airport, for the audience to feel the experience as he does. This does a great job at answering the questions he poses, but sometimes I consider to be too many details. The author spends a majority of this article talking about the morality of eating lobsters. He starts by telling about the member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) assimilate themselves into the Maine Lobster Festival (MLF) in order to pass around anti-lobster brochures. They argue against the live killing of lobsters by boiling then in the largest lobster-cooking tank in the world. He continues to spend the rest of the article to describe whether or not lobsters can feel pain. The tone he uses implies that he believes that lobster can feel pain and is a little unethical, but he doesn’t this that the right to celebrate at the festival outweighs the negatives. Wallace uses a humorous and interested tone to describe the MLF, which I do enjoy. He also does a great job at establishing his ethos in this article. He provides a vast amount of background knowledge to demonstrate his knowledge on the subject and he spend an even larger time speaking of the scientific aspects of pain and how lobsters feel pain. Wallace uses all of these techniques in order to build a strong relationship with his audience, so that they can relate to his experiences. I enjoyed this article better than his last one because it was more scientifically based and was more than just eating lobsters and how he felt eating them.