Consider The Lobster By David Foster Wallace Summary

When I read this sentence in David Foster Wallace’s essay “Consider the Lobster”, I felt a distinctly physical sense of repulsion and empathy: “Lobsters don’t have much in the way of eyesight or hearing, but they do have an exquisite tactile sense, one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that protrude through their carapace.” The phrase “exquisite tactile sense” is what really struck me, not because it’s a particularly special phrase in and of itself but because it was placed in the passage after terms like “live dismemberment” and “knife-in-the-head method” had been thrown out for the reader’s consideration. I can’t help but think that Foster Wallace did this intentionally as a way of emotionally skewering the reader; all I

Some (like the aforementioned “live dismemberment”) are more brutal-sounding than others; in fact, Foster Wallace makes a point of describing them as “worse/crueler”. We are reminded that we are considering not just one particular method (boiling alive) of killing lobster, but a whole host of brutal methods; in other words, we are now being asked to watch ourselves kill the lobster. And in “watching” this process, we see a sad but interesting irony: home cooks’ efforts to lessen the suffering of the lobster through different killing methods most likely cause it to feel more pain. As Foster Wallace presents this problem, he makes an implicit claim, one that is also a challenge to the reader: before we resort to half-hearted attempts at compassion, before we rely on folk-lore and “spirituality-of-the-hunt flavor” to make decisions about these things, we should really consider them. We should research, investigate, ponder, and figure out whatever truth we can before we kill creatures in

In reading and re-reading these few paragraphs, I picture a well-meaning but ignorant-of-lobster person who has a vague feeling that boiling the lobster is causing enormous pain and decides to try and do something about it. In order to assuage a mingled sense of compassion and guilt, this person tries out alternates: heating the water gradually, making the death quick and “merciful” with a knife, and generally convincing him/herself that what they are doing makes it better when, in fact, things are made much, much worse. Take, for instance, the aforementioned “knife-in-the-head” method. Foster Wallace explains that it is thought to be “more violent but ultimately more merciful” and that accepting the “responsibility for stabbing the lobster’s head honors the lobster somehow and entitles one to eat it”. While all of this is well-intentioned, the reality, as discovered through his research into lobster anatomy, is that a lobster’s nerve bundles are positioned throughout its body and that stabbing in just one place is unlikely to cause the kind of quick end that is desired. In fact, it likely does just the opposite, disabling the lobster and causing an unnecessarily long (and, we assume, painful)