Consider the Audience

In Consider The Lobster, David Foster Wallace argues that animals- specifically, lobsters- suffer through complex issues due to humans. Although people may believe that they are superior to animals, cooking lobsters are considered to be a moral decision that is disrespectful and unethical. Using the Maine Lobster Festival as the setting, Wallace uses descriptive language to describe the chefs that toss the alive lobsters-their "claws are pegged or banded to keep them from tearing right one another under the stresses of captivity"-in a boiling pot. In describing the process of killing and cooking the lobster, Wallace brings up two main ethical questions. Can lobsters feel pain? If lobsters can feel pain, can they display behavior to express pain? While Wallace does express the fact that lobsters don't have a similar nervous system, the lobster's scrabbling against the pot is an expression of pain and will to survive. Throughout the piece, Wallace describes the pain of a lobster in human-like terms. The idea that a lobster can shed tears and support one another in "captivity" highlights Wallace's point.
Along with certain rhetorical devices Wallace used, his setting was advantageous. In August for five days, people-especially tourists-feast upon thousands of lobsters. As a non-profit organization, volunteers and fisherman gather to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to fundraise for local stations or other organizations. With a start in 1947, the festival offered a lobster for a $1, feeding many people in need. However, this barely passed the money spent to hold the festival, and so the price increased over time. Now, it can bring in "1 million dollars of "outside" money." This has proved the transfer of worth of the festival and the lobsters that it sells, in conjunction with what Wallace proves.