Essay Collection: Consider the Lobster

Overview
Consider the Lobster is a 2005 collection of essays by David Foster Wallace that gathers a range of long-form journalism and criticism written for magazines. The pieces move between reportage, cultural analysis, and moral inquiry, often using close observation and exhaustive detail to turn seemingly ordinary subjects into sites for philosophical reflection. Wallace's voice alternates between conversational intimacy and rigorous digression, inviting readers to think beyond surface curiosities.
The title essay, originally published in Gourmet, centers on the Maine Lobster Festival and uses the festival as a springboard into a probing ethical question about the practice of boiling lobsters alive. Elsewhere, the collection ranges widely in topic and tone, from examinations of language and lexicography to reportage about politics and attempts to reckon with the cultural aftermath of collective trauma.

Major themes and approach
A persistent concern is moral seriousness: Wallace asks how everyday pleasures and institutions implicate participants in ethical problems they may prefer to ignore. He treats entertainment, food culture, and political spectacle not merely as objects of consumption but as practices that encourage certain dispositions toward others and toward suffering. That ethical lens is sharpened by an insistence on specificity; minute descriptions and technical digressions function as moral microscopes.
Another major thread is language and authority. Wallace often interrogates the gatekeepers and instruments of cultural meaning, editors, lexicographers, and media figures, probing how definitional power shapes thought and behavior. He combines scholarly curiosity with populist impatience, challenging received norms while demonstrating a deep respect for careful, nuanced argumentation.

Representative essays and topics
The title essay uses the Lobster Festival to stage a meditation on animal pain, human pleasure, and the rhetorical work required to translate culinary custom into ethical responsibility. Wallace balances reportage, how the festival operates, how lobsters are handled, with philosophical questions about sentience and moral justification, refusing easy answers while urging conscientious attention.
Other pieces examine the politics of the early 2000s and the role of modern media in shaping political narratives, offering profiles and campaign reportage that illuminate how charisma, narrative framing, and institutional incentives shape public life. Essays on language and usage scrutinize dictionaries, prescriptive rules, and the social consequences of linguistic authority, blending humor, historical background, and serious argument about who gets to decide what words mean and why those decisions matter.

Style, tone, and influence
Wallace's prose is notable for its elasticity: digressive footnotes, bursts of colloquial energy, and an ethic of thoroughness that feels both generous and relentless. He writes as a thinker who delights in detail and who expects readers to follow complex trains of thought. That combination produces moments of genuine surprise and moral discomfort, as the writing pulls readers into ethical terrain they might otherwise avoid.
The collection was widely discussed and cemented Wallace's reputation beyond fiction circles as a premier essayist and public intellectual. His ability to move between high and low cultural registers, to render minutiae compelling, and to wrestle seriously with difficult ethical questions influenced subsequent nonfiction writers and readers interested in rigorous, humane criticism.