David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” is effective through his ability to capture the audience in an unexpected journey. Firstly, Wallace opens with setting. He puts the reader into the geographical location of the event the essay is focused on and gives readers the sense of grandeur surrounding it. The words, “enormous, pungent, and extremely” are attention grabbers from line one. He commercializes the event with a website link and lobster-related items one can find and purchase at such an event, but then dives into the scientific information about the lobster, including proper nomenclature and the origins of the word lobster. From the first few paragraphs of the text, I expected this whole essay to be about the festival and how lobster is the main attraction. I was surprised to read factual information amongst the topic of a lobster festival, and that surprise kept me engaged. Wallace also supplies readers with historical research on lobsters, such as how poor people and prisoners used to eat it. Back then, it was considered “cruel and unusual” (55) punishment to feed inmates lobster more than once a week, which I still can’t get over because lobster is very expensive now and usually boujee people like to brag about eating such foods. Wallace writes (in reference to current day), “In the U.S. pop-food imagination, lobster is now the seafood analog to steak…” (55). Seeing how the times have changed, how attitudes have changed, about lobsters is rather interesting.
Wallace is able to create such a captivating essay because it’s so strange. The reader thinks it will go in one direction, and then it branches off into another. I didn’t know there was so much to write about on the topic of lobsters. After the historical and scientific facets of the lobster are addressed, Wallace goes back to creating a setting at the MLF, but this time in a different light. Wallace writes about the festival as an annoyance: too many people, not enough room, and everybody is squished together. In fact, Wallace describes these attributes of the festival to be “irksome little downers” (55), and points out that “the Maine Lobster Festival really is is a mid-level country fair with a culinary hook, and in this respect it’s not unlike [other festivals]…” (55). This was unexpected, as I thought this whole essay was going to be about celebrating the festival.
Wallace then returns to facts—why we eat lobsters in the summer, how they’re caught, how long they live, hard versus soft shell, how it relates to the economy, but inserts a conversational tone to keep the reader interested. Wallace writes, “Chitinous arthropods grow by molting, rather the way people have to buy bigger clothes as they age and gain weight” (56). He says certain statements in the way people might converse with one another. Wallace then goes into another aspect of this new lobster world, and addresses readers directly through second person. He writes about how to prepare lobsters and by addressing the reader, it feels as though one is following a recipe of sorts. Wallace sets up the whole essay in such a way that the reader would not expect the whole point of it to be a reflection on the morality in cooking lobsters alive. Maybe Wallace didn’t know what the point of the essay was until he got to it, either.
The reason this essay is so captivating is that it’s unexpected. I didn’t expect Wallace to contemplate the morality of cooking lobsters alive, or to end on that note, or to go into the neuroscience of brains and how they perceive pain. At the end, Wallace writes, “I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here—at least I don’t think so. I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival” (64). Wallace reveals (I think to himself and the readers at the same time) that the purpose of this journey was to “articulate” some issues Wallace has with this strange lobster world, as it is not all fun and pleasant—there are deeper reflections to be made on it.
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