Consider the Lobster and Other Essays Literary Elements

Short-form non-fiction

1990's America, primarily heartlands America. Context: Mostly occurs during post-9/11 political division.

Wallace himself, in the form of strictly first-person, expositional essay.

Critical and ironic. Perhaps even cynical at times.

"Protagonist" is the concept of intellectual honesty, and the "antagonist" is the critical subject of each essay.

In post-9/11 America, the nature of discourse changed. Art, politics, and religion all became insulated and contemptuous of those who disagreed. This is the primary conflict Wallace addresses in these essays.

The title essay occurs in the most climactic position in the collection, which is ironic, because the essay is perhaps the most indirect of them all, but it is the most central to the true theme of the collection: the American relationship to pleasure, pain and moral goodness.

Much of the literary-critical essays contain an ominous tone for the state of art and entertainment in this country. The political essays are particularly foreboding. Wallace's essays have often been called prophetic.

The Tracy Austin essay discusses how Wallace feels 'disappointed' by Austin's memoir, but then his criticism is absolutely scathing.

The AVN essay alludes to the various award shows that exist in pop-culture to draw an uncomfortable parallel between our thirst for entertainment and our willingness to use pornography.

Sexually gratuitous in "Big Red Son," and "Certainly the End of Something, One Would Sort of Have to Think." Pastoral in the political essays. Religious imagery occurs subtly throughout all of Wallace's writing.

Consistently, a paradoxical relationship exists between pleasure and joy. The mind naturally assumes they are of the same nature, but Wallace's sharp social criticism seems to suggest that they might actually be mutually exclusive.

The way Wallace criticizes ethics is the same way he criticizes political views, and it's the same way he criticizes art theory and the performance of his fellow writers. The parallelism here is the under-spoken, cynical treatment he gives to the subjects of his criticism.

As a literary device, the treatment of the AVN awards ceremony as a parallel for the Academy Awards is an example of parallelism in his logic, and parallelism in his language occurs in almost every piece.

When Wallace discusses his own unhappiness with his body in light of seeing a male pornstar, that is a metonymous argument; he is actually discussing how desire, comparison and indulgence are destructive to the self and soul by way of unfortunate psychological wiring.

Synecdoche occurs when Wallace criticizes the entire US political system by poking fun at McCain specifically.

The lobster is personified in the title essay, at least by some people Wallace interviews or quotes. Also, the treatment of art and literature is often personified in Wallace's essays, like saying that Tracy Austin's autobiography 'broke his heart.'