Respond to: Consider the Lobster

In this article I identify a few different genres occurring at once. I would say that the main genre would be tragicomedy. I believe there were elements of both comedy and some of tragedy in this writing. The tragedy part would of course be the serious part where the author talks about lobsters experiencing pain, and the different ways there are that people kill/cook them. The comedy part for me would be where he exaggerates. One of those parts would be where he compares preparing of a lobster to slaughter.

Footnotes would usually play a role to the reader only if they do not understand a specific word or phrase. In this article we see that David Wallace uses them in a way that continues his thought process about his own writing. What I think is different in his footnotes is that they are not the usual short version of max a sentence long explanation but they even give you an example that might not even have anything to do with the article's topic. One example of his footnotes would be on top of page 60, where he explains how people carry lobsters from the store to their home. Here he gives another example by using birds and how they act in a cage.

I believe this article shift topics a few times. Wallace would write about one thing and then go to further explaining how the specificity here works. All the topics were relevant to one another because they were all about lobsters. He wrote about where the name "lobster" comes from, how do they behave in different water temperatures, etc. By saying "consider the lobster" I think Wallace means that we need to decide as individuals what theory we agree with. Do we agree that lobsters do not experience pain? Or would we agree with the statement that killing/cooking a lobster is inhumane and cruel?