TOW #14 Second Half of David Foster Wallace's Consider The Lobster

The second half of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster consists of four essays, spanning several decades of David Foster Wallace's writing career, and a wide variety of topics. These include The View from Mrs. Thompson's, How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, Up Simba, and Host. For this TOW post, I'll analyze the two that to me, held the most significance. 

The essay that I enjoyed perhaps more than any other in this collection was The View from Mrs. Thompson's. This essay, spanning about twenty pages in length, detailed Wallace's experience watching the events of 9/11 unfold from his neighbor's house in his small Illinois hometown. Wallace's essential purpose in discussing these events is to provide a unique view on a famous event, and in doing so, connect on an emotional level with his audience and provide his own perspective on the impact of 9/11 on the American psyche. While most publicly known stories from September 11th, 2001 take place in New York City, amid the smoke, dust, and chaos that so many experienced that day. In providing his experiences from a completely different location on that day, the sort of location that very few consider when they think about the events of that day. 

This in and of itself acts as a sort of powerful rhetorical device, as it allows him to connect with a much wider audience when he describes his feelings from that day. The vast majority of American's where going about their ordinary day to day to lives on that day; working in their offices, dropping their kids off at school, etc. By retelling his experiences of this day from the same sort of perspective that so many other American's did, he provides a powerful sort of pathos-based connection to the average American's that make up much of his reading audience. This rhetorical tool does much to enforce Wallace's purpose of connecting his own experiences with the experiences of other normal American's on that day. "I'm trying to explain the way part of the horror of 9/11 was knowing that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my own, mine, and Frank's, and poor old loathsome Duane's -- than these ladies America, too." By this he means that the real fear of the day was knowing that others held such hatred for the things that he, and all of his neighbors held commonplace. In this way, he acknowledges rather powerfully that his fears were the same fears that most American's held on that day, and immediately afterwards. 

The other essay that I particularly enjoyed from the second half of Consider the Lobster was How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart. This editorial can best be described as a scathing review of famed tennis Star Tracy Austin's biography, a generally critical commentary on the nature of modern sports journalism, and what he observes as a major problem regarding celebrities and their ghostwritten biographies. It begins with a bold confession on the part of Wallace; as a younger man, he was very much romantically interested in Austin. This is in part what led to his disappointment with her autobiography. The primary reason, however, for his disappointment in her biography was what he described as "breathtakingly insipid" exposition and a generally poor writing ability on the part of the author. 

This, in Wallace's opinion is precisely why these stories sell so well. As Wallace describes it, the American public looks to super star athletes and other celebrities for autobiographies and other material surrounding their lives because they are consumable, and because they provide the sort of "potato chip" reading material than many Americans seem to crave. In a word, Americans seem to crave the story of humble beginnings, natural talent, overcoming obstacles, and striving for perfection against all odds that seems to define every story of an athletic super star currently sold in book stores. While this essay was written in the early nineties, the same notion rings true in the modern era with recent film hits like The Blind Side, and the emerging story of the super star Little League world series pitcher Monique Davis, who won the hearts and minds of America this summer with an astonishing performance at the Little League World Series.  

To justify this belief of his, Wallace makes primary use of direct quotes from Austin's autobiography. These are the only rhetorical device needed, simply because they provide all of the evidence required to clarify Wallace's opinion that the nature of sport's journalism has taken a turn for the worst since the dawn of the super star athletes autobiography. Overall, he is successful in his claim due to the scathing nature of his critiques, the pointed and supportive nature of the quotations he pulls from the text, and the disappointed tone of his essay.