The article “Consider the Lobster” by David Wallace opens a vivid, gruesome window, to a harsh truth that all lobster consumers push far back into the recesses of their minds. Wallace implores us to visit the controversial issue of boiling a live creature to death, for the sole purpose of our consumption. He uses a variety of literary persuasive tactics including the three rhetorical appeals Logos, Pathos and Ethos to drive home his argument to the reader.
Throughout the article Wallace puts the reader on the front lines of a three-front war of convincing ethical, emotional and logical appeals. While his opinion is abundantly clear, he intelligently and craftily builds exceedingly relatable analogies for the reader. He tees the unsuspecting reader off with a light
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His findings on how a lobster can sense the changes in temperature of water by even just a few degrees clearly refute the prior claims that lobsters have no brain, or feel any pain. Pathos, our appeal to emotion is analogized very well when he describes the lobster clawing to the edge of the pot and compares it to much like a human, hanging onto the edge of a roof for dear life. An exceptional job is done by the writer in humanizing the lobster and getting the reader on his side. There is a great appeal to the morality behind boiling the lobster and Wallace relates to the reader himself by professing how uneasy he is with the idea of animal cruelty and how he and no one else likes to think about it. This is a sentiment most people can very easily associate with, this underlying thought that most of us enjoy consuming meat, but also have a liberal attitude regarding animal cruelty. He continues to test our ethical threshold by describing how they are bound and tied up, almost like a prisoner we are holding captive, only to be released into rapidly boiling water for 35 to 45 seconds before it happily welcomes death. The