Consider the Lobster Analysis

                David Foster Wallace in his essay Consider the Lobster writes an intriguing essay (from a rhetorical standpoint) about a lobster festival that develops into something much more. The essay begins with just the lobster festival and a description of it, but Wallace expertly transitions the essay to become something of a moral battleground causing many of us what is called in psychology cognitive dissonance (the discomfort that you feel when two opposing opinions come into contact with each other in your mind). It is really impressive the way in which he does this. He uses this festival as an opportunity to write about the morality of cooking lobster while it is still alive. It is interesting how he uses the festival as a starting point to move into his opinions lobsters. He first starts with festival and then moves into the subject of lobsters, many facts and statistics are pulled out so that by the end of the essay you feel as though you could write this 350 page paper solely on the facts that he states, but this seems to be essential to the paper because the reader then feels that they know lobsters better than just that really expensive food that you get every once in a while.  The lobster then becomes more of a living thing to the reader. After what seems like a possibly infinite amount of lobster facts Wallace brings the focus back to the festival and starts talking about the organization PETA, who is apparently at the lobster festival most years to explain the pain that lobsters may or may not experience while being boiled. From here Wallace gets into the lobster meat of things¹ he turns the reader’s attention to what he really wanted to go to all along, the lobster cooking morality. He leaves the reader in a grey ambiguous area where you’re left not quite sure what you believe anymore because the whole world seems to have been turned upside down by lobsters. Wallace makes the reader think about their view on the subject and probably even managed to change a few opinions on the matter.

1: I know it was bad, but after seeing Wallace do it so many times I thought that I’d give footnotes a shot and for some reason it was the only thing I could think of that seemed worthy of one. I apologize for any pain that the pun may have caused.