An Analysis
Ostensibly a travel piece for ‘Gourmet’ magazine, ‘Consider the Lobster’ begins as a critical and sardonic description about the commercialization of festival tourism. It eventually develops into a moral reflection on the ethics of animal suffering. The slow development of his argument is one of Wallace’s key strategies. It is bookended by misanthropic sentiment, from hyperbolic complaints about traffic (Wallace, 1) to sardonic remarks in his closing paragraph about the inability of “public discussion” to solve the moral dilemmas he raises. (7).Through a variety of techniques, Wallace presents an argument that is cogent, lacking in dogma and reaches only tentative conclusions. ...
