Consider The Lobster

David Foster Wallace’s style is pivotal toward understanding a complex and at times jumbled text. “Consider the Lobster” contains several footnotes, a text feature commonly employed by Wallace, which complicate and expand his argument. These footnotes offer exposition such as why he was speaking to a rental car liaison, clarify details such as the nature of the debate between human and animal life versus culinary taste and animal life, and give tangential thoughts such as what it means to be a tourist in America. These footnotes inform the reader’s understanding of Wallace’s argument, which is notable for lacking a central claim or thesis; rather, Wallace raises questions for the reader to consider.

Wallace departs from a typical argumentative structure, but shows a deep understanding of his subject. For Wallace, style is a central function of the essay. Lacking a clear moral message for the reader, Wallace relies on discursiveness to explore the complications of killing, animal rights, sentience, feeling, culture, and perception. All of these issues arise out of Wallace’s central message of the essay which is, as the title makes clear, to consider the lobster.

Wallace’s style relies on a mixture of objective distance and personal interjections. Though he refers to himself at times in the third person as “your assigned correspondent,” he also often brings up his own beliefs and ideas using the first person (236). Wallace’s journalistic high ground then gets undercut by his own subjective and personal interjections. This prevents the reader from getting sick of a sanctimonious tone because the author himself is, like the reader, uncertain. One of Wallace’s goals in the piece, in fact, is to not sound like someone who has all the answers and is  critical of the moral choices of a lobster consumer. He writes that he does not want to “come across as shrill or preachy” since he’s actually just “confused” about the topic (253). So often in the text when a reader feels like the author is setting up a final moral pronouncement, Wallace instead will interject his own opinions and admit that he is no better than anyone attending the Maine Lobster Festival, since he also has not worked out the morality of the issue.

Yet Wallace is operating from a different position than the lobster festival attendants (and the reader). For one thing, he has clearly researched the science of lobsters much more than most readers. For another, he asks pointed questions to readers he assumes have not considered them before. One of his goals is to bring the moral issues of food to the readers of Gourmet who, he hopes, would be “extra attentive and thoughtful” about the food they consume; to Wallace, being a gourmand should be about more than just how food is presented and how it tastes, even though he wonders if the reader agrees (254). He also addresses the use of the adjective “good” in the magazine’s description as “The Magazine of Good Living” and implies that the reader of the magazine is not practicing “good living” if the reader does not consider the ethics of consumption (254). But, just as he stylistically complicates his pronouncements with digressive interjections, even at the article’s end, he stops short of pushing it too far, saying that “there are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other” (254). His goal is simply to make the reader interested enough to ask the same  questions.

Most of the essay is concerned with how best to ask questions, then, rather than how to answer them. The title, “Consider the Lobster,” is literally a command to the reader. It’s also a play on the title of a famous food work, 1941’s Consider the Oyster, a book about the history, preparation, and consumption of oysters. Gourmet was a magazine devoted to food and consumption, and Wallace seems obsessed with the idea of what a reader of the magazine would normally do or not do. He even suggests the editor of a rival publication, Food & Wine, would never actually attend the Maine Lobster Festival (despite her recommending it on CNN), as the festival itself is a disappointment. The implication is that the reader of Gourmet would also not enjoy the festival, despite the magazine publishing an article about it. This is because the festival itself is full of “irksome little downers” that prevent him from being able to enjoy it even before considering his main question of whether it is okay to painfully kill a lobster for human pleasure (239).

Wallace brings up a host of other issues apart from the ethics of animal consumption. The financial statuses of two separate adjacent communities—Camden and Rockland—is one such topic. Camden is full of money and vacation destinations, while Rockland is a town wholly dependent on the economy of lobsters (he also mentions that one of his parents grew up in a part of the state that is less glamorous still, as it is associated with potato farming). He alludes to a similar dynamic in the conversations between tourists and locals, such as the conversation he has with a cabdriver and a “wealthy political consultant” who lives on a nearby island for part of the year (243). The cabdriver says locals like the festival, although he doesn’t remember attending it, while the “demilocal” complains about the PETA protesters (244). The rental car agent, Dick, straddles the two viewpoints by admitting the PETA people “do their thing” while the locals “do our thing” (244). Wallace shares these viewpoints to suggest two versions of lobster in Maine. The person who owns a vacation home can only complain about the protesters disrupting his idyllic version of lobster consumption, while the actual locals who, like Dick, are at least partially dependent on lobsters, tourism, or both, don’t really care about the protesters. One assumes the Gourmet readers are more like the “demilocal” than they are like Dick.

The science of these “giant sea insects” (237) and their capacity to feel pain dominates the middle section of the text. Wallace provides evidence that suggests that lobsters do experience pain, albeit it perhaps not in the same way humans do, but this is not widely known. In fact, the brochures at the festival provide misinformation to consumers, reinforcing the idea that lobsters do not any feel pain at all. The fact that this falsehood is actively promoted suggests that consumers would be bothered if they knew the truth, but they nevertheless do all sorts of mental gymnastics to avoid thinking about the issue because they like the way lobsters taste. Wallace doesn’t focus much on how lobsters taste, however. Though he lists different ways lobster can be prepared, he doesn’t actually describe his own experience of them as a food. Instead, the focus is on how the lobster experiences pain and what humans do to justify that pain—lying about it or, in the case of Wallace himself, trying to just “avoid thinking about” it, as so many readers of Gourmet likely do (246).

Wallace notes that he has no plans to become a vegetarian and wonders if the fact that lobster is killed directly for consumption makes it better or worse than beef or pork which comes packaged in small morsels that make the consumer forget the animal from which it came. To make that point, he humorously references a “World’s Largest Killing Floor” at a hypothetical beef festival (247). But he also notes the “hysterical” and “extreme” futility of comparing killing lobsters to the Holocaust or the Roman circuses, since he believes “animals are less morally important than human beings” (253). So the reader is once again left unsure of the morality of eating lobster, eating meat in general, or of consumption in general.

Wallace, then, leaves the ball in the reader’s court. After considering the moral status of animals, the experience of pain, and the act of consumption, Wallace leaves the reader to decide for themselves what to do with this information. He himself admits he has not worked out the “sort of personal ethical system” that he seems to imply the reader might want or need, and so the reader may be left feeling overwhelmed by the idea of reaching any certain moral conclusion in a world in which every act of consumption carries with it a whole host of issues ranging from ethics to economics to existence. That may be Wallace’s ultimate point.