Shipping Out Analysis

                Shipping Out by David Foster Wallace is a twenty four page essay about Wallace’s experience on a cruise ship. Wallace talks extensively about the human condition or at least the American condition and often likes to make fun of it. The author’s main purpose is to entertain his audience and to accurately describe his experience on the trip. Wallace’s attention to detail is incredible, he recounts every piece of the ship and describes the things that he did very well. He molds these details all into one common theme, everything on the ship is fake. The tourists, the workers, even the ship itself has a faux atmosphere around it that all ties into the theme. Wallace talks extensively about the details of the ship making some keen observations, or really just one observation, it is always spotless and perfect. There is no place with rust on it, the windows get washed every morning to wash the salt, and the one time that Wallace did come in contact with a defect it was fixed within minutes of him catching it. The author leads this all back to the fakeness of the ship he almost seems to imply that it is in some way a dystopian society that holds the appearance of a perfect world. The workers on this ship according to Wallace work to achieve the image, they as Wallace puts it, “pamper you to death” where they truly work as hard as they can to make sure their customers have a good time on the ship and feel the luxury. The author describes how his maid would somehow always know when he was going to be out for thirty minutes or more because when that happened he would come back to a spotless room. There was also his waiter who was so serious about the tourists experiencing a good time that it would pain him to hear anything other than that their experience was great. This plays once again into the dystopian society that Wallace has created on the ship through his reflections. The tourists are then the final piece to the dystopian puzzle, the stupid citizens that play into the hands of the higher ups and have lost all value. He constantly speaks of the materialistic tourists and how in the end he starts to become one too no matter how hard he fights it. Wallace really uses his experiences to paint a picture of a cruise ship in a light that many would not think of.