Is It Right To Eat Lobsters?

Wallace does an exceptional job of describing his experience at the Maine Lobster Festival, the history, anatomy, and the ethics of cooking a lobster. Not only does he just state the events, but he describes in such detail that can leave you disoriented, perhaps thunderstruck, after reading his whole article. Throughout his narrative, he demonstrates qualities of a good narrative essay, such as including many details, varying sentence structure, and maintaining clear narrative order.

In each situation he describes, he illustrates a visual with a variety of words, leaving the reader feeling as if they’re watching a movie. When he goes to the festival, he describes the area having, “There are lobster T-shirts and lobster bobblehead dolls and inflatable lobster pool toys and clamp-on lobster hats with big scarlet claws that wobble on springs.” The repetitive use of lobster emphasizes the importance of lobster there and to demonstrate its prevalence. When trying to depict the anatomy of a lobster, he says, “characterized by five pairs of jointed legs, the first pair terminating in large pincerish claws,” and “stalked eyes, gills on their legs, and antennae.” It paints a clear picture in the reader’s mind of how a lobster looks like even though he didn’t provide a picture. Lastly, when he describes when a lobster being boiled or cooked alive, he goes into vivid detail, one that you cannot forget for a long time. For example, “you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around.”

Another key good quality to his writing is his varying sentence structure. He never begins two sentences with the same word, and each sentence is of different length. The reader would not be able to be distracted by sentence format because Wallace does an excellent of conveying his point to his reader by using a plethora of words to begin and end his sentences.

Finally, the flow of his paper from one story to another is remarkable. He begins with him being at the festival, then discusses the structure of a lobster, and then delves deep into the ethics cooking lobster alive by presenting and debating several sources. He uses accurate verb tenses and transitions to make one idea shift into another, which is unnoticeable by the reader.