"Check Please!" And Other Delicious Table Talk

Nice to Eat With You: Acts of Communion is the chapter I have chosen to explore. In this chapter of How To Read Like A Professor, Foster examines the idea of what a meal is all about. Not the silverware, specialty dishes or drinks of the meals, but rather the underlying themes that come with them in novels. He has many different ways of processing this. Most prominent of which is that whatever, wherever or however people are having a meal together, its a communion. Weather positive or negative, Foster says the choice of sharing meals is a way of communicating “I’m with you, I like you, we form a community together.”  Amazing, how such a broad subject such as eating with others can be defined in this small statement. This made me think about how we view the world with emotions, and how everything around us is then controlled by them. Say if you are in love with someone and go out to dinner with them, it makes the dinner act and feel different then, say, a dinner with another person that you have un-fond memories of. I'd say thats one of the most amazing things about human nature, the ability to create our own tint of the worlds sunglasses based on what is inside only us. Of course the things that happen around us can effect and control our emotions, but they aren't feeling them for us. Only we can do that!  

Nighthawks, a painting by Edward Hopper 

Perhaps its because of another main point made in this chapter.  Foster states that sometimes a meal is just a meal and eating with others is simply eating with others. But more often than not, though, it’s not. This immediately reminded me of a novel I read not but about four months ago. It was Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger. If you have read the book you will probably know why it came to my mind with this chapter. Nearly the entire half of the novel that is said by Frannys point of view, is about the meal. Lane and Franny attend a lunch specifically at a restaurant that is known to have students dine there who are very intellectual. This small detail already gives a nod to Fosters Freud like point and gives the meal a moreover meaning then before. Franny is unhappy with the connotations that come with this restaurant because they stand against how she would ideally like Lane to be. Lane treats being at this setting like ego booster and image creator. Their reasons for being together in this place at this moment are already different. Their contrasting outlooks cause a kind of roof over the story that is otherwise, at this point, just two people going out for lunch. Yet it all boils down to the fact that a meal situation was chosen in this novel to demonstrate necessary intimacy. They are falling out of love because they are in a place where the only person they are communicating with are each other. 

Weather the significance in in the nervous fiddling of a napkin or the fatal poison that lie in an unknowings cup, eating together stands as a strong form of symbolism in a novel.