Bloomingtonians

“It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.” This is a saying we all have heard multiple times in our life. Author, David Foster Wallace wrote two popular pieces, “Consider the Lobster” and “The view from Mrs. Thompson’s,” both of which start out with the positives of life and having fun with people. Consider the Lobster is about a small town called, “Bloomington” in Illinois, this is about the people’s reaction to 9/11 and how people that are separate ban together in a time of need. The view from Mrs. Thompson’s starts with the festivities of the Maine Lobster Festival but slowly turns into a plead to stop eating lobster because they have some feelings and just cling to the side of the pot holding on to life. These two pieces are surprisingly similar how they are written and they follow the same path throughout each piece.
“Bloomingtonians aren’t unfriendly but do tend to be reserved. A stranger will smile warmly at you, but there normally won’t be any of that strangely chat in waiting areas or checkout lines.” Wallace uses this to set a tone in The view from Mrs. Thompson’s that makes Bloomington seem like every other town in the U.S., everyone is normal and keeps to themselves. In Consider the Lobster Wallace makes Maine the place to be. “The assigned subject of this article is the 56th Annual MLF, July 30 to August 3, 2003, whose official theme was Lighthouses, Laughter, and Lobster. Total paid attendance was over 80,000, due partly to a national CNN spot in June during which a Senior Editor of a certain other epicurean magazine hailed the MLF as one of the best food-themed festivals in the world.” Even though the tone in each piece starts differently they are structured the same way.
Quickly, the piece, The view from Mrs. Thompson’s gets extremely real for any American. “People responded to 9/11 with flags, you never saw flags until 9/11. There were big flags, small flags, regular sized flags and angled flags, and thousands of hand held flags.” This...