Consider the Lobster

Consider the Lobster is an essay by the American writer David Foster Wallace, first published in Gourmet magazine in August 2004. Commissioned as festive food-travel coverage of the Maine Lobster Festival, it grows into a moral inquiry about boiling animals alive, and is studied in HSC English Extension 1's elective on hybrid worlds.

First published in Gourmet in August 2004, Consider the Lobster began as a straightforward commission: the glossy culinary monthly sent David Foster Wallace to cover the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival and expected a piece of festive food-travel writing. What it received, and printed, was an essay that turns on the question of whether it is defensible to boil an animal alive.

The essay has no plot; it is built as genres accumulating rather than events unfolding. Wallace accepts the brief of travel reportage - the crowds, the World's Largest Lobster Cooker, the Styrofoam trays, the Maine Sea Goddess pageant - and then lets a second text grow inside the first: a piece of moral philosophy about pain, sentience and complicity that the travel frame can no longer contain. Grafted onto the reportage is a strand of patient, technical writing about the lobster as a "giant sea-insect", about nociceptors and the seconds it takes an animal to die in boiling water. Beneath and around it all run a confessional first person that keeps turning the moral question back on the writer himself, and the famous footnote apparatus - a second track of qualification, digression and dark comedy.

Along the way Wallace reports the voices of a culture organised around not thinking: Dick the rental-car man's confident folk-neurology and the Maine Lobster Promotion Council's reassuring literature. He refuses the easy positions of both the activist and the gourmet, and the essay ends not with a verdict but with a confession of confusion and a decision to break off.

The founding concern, and the one the elective foregrounds, is that a single subject can require more than one form, and that the forms need not be reconciled. The collision begins in the diction: the opening's "enormous, pungent, and extremely well marketed Maine Lobster Festival" lets a sceptical register leak through the promotional adjectives, and the deflating verdict "What the Maine Lobster Festival really is is a mid-level county fair with a culinary hook" hollows the reportage form without discarding it. Register lurches do the same work in miniature - "The point is that lobsters are basically giant sea-insects" drops Latinate taxonomy into schoolyard plainness - while the numbered apparatus of "(1) pain as a purely neurological event, and (2) actual suffering" imports a philosophy paper into a food magazine.

Beneath the formal experiment is a genuine moral inquiry: "Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?" The blunt "boil ... alive" refuses the euphemism of the surrounding food writing, and Wallace exposes the culture's own euphemistic vocabulary for killing. Complicity is built as a shared condition rather than an accusation: "The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming)" folds the reader into the animal's position while delivering horror as a joke.

The essay is finally about attention - the moral difference between noticing and choosing not to notice. The leap from the Maine fair to "Nero's entertainments or Aztec sacrifices" defamiliarises a scene the reportage had made ordinary, and his recursive questioning turns attention into a regress the reader is caught inside. Reported voices demonstrate not-thinking rather than describe it: Dick's confident claim that "lobsters' brains don't have this part" is left standing before the science quietly corrects it.

Where a conventional argument resolves, the essay stops. Wallace confesses that his own position is "selfishly convenient" rather than reasoned, admits to real confusion, and breaks off: "these questions lead straightaway into such deep and treacherous waters that it's probably best to stop the public discussion right here." The refusal of closure is itself the hybrid gesture - the personal essay's honesty borrowed against the moral argument's demand for a verdict.

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