DFW Journal #1
If David Foster Wallace were to attend a discussion in our class, I would ask him if his investigation and writing of the “Consider the Lobster” essay led him to make any changes to his eating habits. Did he enjoy eating lobster before this assignment? Did he continue eating lobster after writing the essay? Did his exploration of the morals behind eating lobster change his experience of eating other meats? Was his intent behind writing the essay to get readers to make a change to their own eating habits? Did he want to cause people to care more about how their food is prepared? To cause a change in the lobster and other meat industries? Does he think that the preparation for eating lobster is more or less humane than the preparation for eating other meats? I also wonder what the overall reaction from readers was. Did readers give his questions a lot of thought?
Wallace’s essay posed many complex questions, some of which even he struggled to answer for himself. This challenge allowed the reader to think about how he or she answered the question for themselves. It can be hard to predict how readers might approach these questions, which can limit how a writer develops off of them. One way to anticipate these reactions from the audience is to approach the topic from multiple points of view. We can see that Wallace did this, discussing how tourists versus locals view the festival or how he discussed lobster as a food versus lobster in the wild. This gave the readers a good context to base their answers off of as they tackled the questions he posed. Another way audience questions and reactions could be anticipated is to approach the topic or idea as if for the first time, and think about what questions and thoughts you yourself would want answered or addressed.
