Rhetorical Analysis Of Consider The Lobster

In 2004, Gourmet Magazine reached out to writer David Foster Wallace to write about the well marketed Maine Lobster Festival. Though he did express his feelings towards this event, it presumably wasn't the perception Gourmet Magazine was expecting. Blinded by the heavy amounts of sarcasm, they published it anyways. Consider the Lobster dives into the disreputable actions of people cooking and consuming lobster. Anyone who reads David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster will recognize his display of emotional appeal, sarcastic tone, and irony that highlights a controversy of American beliefs of the ethicality of eating lobster.

Wallace’s imaginative vocabulary crawled into the back of his reader’s heads, having a constant thought that we are doing something unethical. The descriptive language that he displayed tugged heart strings when Wallace conveyed the image of a struggling, boiling, live lobster. “Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off.” (Wallace). Wallace’s words appeal to any human being’s emotions by

Wallace equips sarcasm to his portrayal of lobster boiling to further convince his readers of their corrupt eating habits. An example of this device is when Wallace satirically explores whether “lobsters are more like those frontal-lobotomy patients one reads about who report experiencing pain in a totally different way than you and I.” (Wallace 63) In this context, the writer challenges those who say that lobsters don’t feel the pain when they are boiled. Wallace argues that the damage is still taking place, regardless of whether or not lobsters feel it. His sarcasm not only makes the article comical, but he illustrates the counterargument through this satirical way. This allows readers to automatically laugh at anything else that goes against his own