Consider the Lobster

In consider the lobster by David Foster Wallace the two main genres of writing that I saw in the article was research paper and personal narrative. I thought it was really interesting how in the beginning he was writing about lobsters as a species and it was very much like a research paper. Then he switched it up to a personal narrative about the Maine Lobster Festival and his experience there. After that it took a more philosophical turn about the moral implications of boiling another living thing alive for food. He gets very vivid talking about how there are different ways that people will cook lobsters and how they will cling to the edge of the pot to try and not get boiled alive. The footnotes in this article are particularly important because that's where he goes into a lot more detail about something he talked about in the actual article. For example when talking about the lobster’s nociceptors. In the actual article the explanation of what a nociceptor is would not really fit in fluidly; however, under the 17th footnote he can go in and describe how nociceptors are pain receptors and they are, “susceptible to potentially damaging extremes of temperature, to mechanical forces, and to chemical substances which are released when body tissues are damaged” (Wallace 63). This article definitely shifts topics. He goes from research on lobsters, to a personal narrative on how his experience at the Maine Lobster Festival went, to the moral implications on how all the ways we cook lobster are pretty torturous. When David Foster Wallace says, “Consider the Lobster” I think he wants us to think about how a lot of times we will tell ourselves things to make something like boiling a crustacean alive acceptable. However, we look back on people like the Aztecs did human sacrifices and did the same thing. Maybe in the future they will look back and think of this as barbaric and immoral.