Preferential Consideration: Bartleby, Class, and Genocide in David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster”

This article presents the case for reading Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” as a key intertext for David Foster Wallace’s 2004 essay, “Consider the Lobster”. Focusing upon Wallace’s assertion that “it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering” the piece reads Wallace’s work through the lenses of capital, class, political aesthetics, ecology, and genocide. Ultimately, though, this article argues that Wallace’s essay ends with ethical stalemate since Wallace is unwilling to commit to a political stance. It is, as I here argue, as though Wallace’s essay would “prefer not to” make an actual decision.