Consider the Lobster

This article is definitely very informative in the way it describes the history of the Maine lobster festival, while staying true to a narrative. It goes through the average Maine lobster fest and describes the experience from the pungent smell, to the busy streets, and towns people.

The footnotes of this article really go in to detail about different phrases or events you may need to have some type of background knowledge or experience with to understand. Foster Wallace’s use of footnotes makes it easy for someone who may not have ever been to Maine or know the lingo and certain statistics. They really help expand his target audience, because anybody can read this article and have an understanding of exactly what he is talking about. Like on the twelfth footnote he starts off with “To elaborate by way of example…” and I believe this really sets the tone for all of his footnotes because he uses them to delve into the information presented a little deeper.

This article does slightly shift topics, but its in a way that makes sense. It starts off by describing a pretty popular tradition “Lobster fest” a festival in Maine and its typical events. The article then slowly shift to ethics, and what Lobster Fests grueling hidden details are. When Wallace says “Consider the Lobster” he really means think of the ethics in this mass killing of lobster. These people are basically glorifying a mass killing of Lobsters and I completely understand where he’s coming from. I have heard of lobster fest and when Wallace put it into this perspective it really made me think, because we would never have a fried chicken or burger fest where we had live baby cows and chicks and then slaughtered them in a mass killing, but because lobsters aren’t mammals people don’t think of it in those terms.