




Every day we go through our same banal daily routine. We wake up, eat, go to work or school, go home, sleep and repeat. This for the most part, other than minor changes like going to the store, is our life. In David Foster Wallace’s speech “This is Water,” Wallace asks the graduating class of Kenyon this question: How can we avoid living mundane lives? By looking at Wallace’s use of literary devices we see that he wants us to use our education to choose how and what we think, in order to prevent us from living our life on the “default setting”.

Wallace begins his speech with a simple short story. Two young fish meet up with an older fish who asks “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The younger fish respond with “What the hell is water?” Water is used as a symbol for life. The younger fish are unaware of what life is. Wallace uses water again at the end of his speech, “we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: This is water. This is water.” In this quote, water is used as a symbol for the basic and transparent things in life. Wallace wants the audience to pay attention to the smallest things in life, like water which is something everyone uses every day. Without water, life would not exist. The two different symbols that water represents directly correlate with the theme. Wallace wants us to be aware, like the older fish who knows about being surrounded by water, of the smallest things in life, like water which is something we use every day.

Wallace also uses another short story on page XI, which is about a Christian and an Atheist. The Atheist is stuck in a blizzard and in fear of his life he prays to God. The Christian is shocked as in why the Atheist still doesn’t believe in God if he survived the blizzard by getting rescued by Eskimos. The purpose of the short story was to inform the audience to change the way to think. Normally, whenever religion is brought up there are huge arguments and fights on who is right and who is wrong. However, Wallace explains that you should instead think about “where they come from INSIDE the two guys (pg XI).” He is persuading the audience to think about where your beliefs come from, instead of which religion is correct. He later says “blind certainty, a close-mindedness amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up (pg XII).” Wallace is justifying that you need to have an open-mind and change your thoughts.

Another literary device Wallace uses throughout his speech is hyperbole. On page XIII Wallace says “And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting…” Here, Wallace is exaggerating when he says if you don’t get out of your comfort zone, your life will be dead, unconscious, and a slave. He even admits to using exaggeration in the next sentence. By using a hyperbole, Wallace makes sure his message is heard; which is to avoid the “natural default setting” at all cost. 

Another phrase that Wallace repeats in his speech is liberal arts education. His audience is graduating students of Kenyon College, so he wants to explain the importance of what exactly that liberal arts education provides. On page XI Wallace is analyzing the short story between the Christian and Atheist through a liber arts analysis, explaining how you are taught that the ideas of both the Christian and Atheist are two totally different ideas to two totally different people. On page XIV he states that education gives you a “choice to think.” Education allows people to have a choice of what to think about. You can think the automatic and boring way, or you can choose to think differently. Instead of getting mad at someone for cutting you off in traffic, you can choose to think that you were in their way because they were in a hurry for something urgent. The reason why Wallace stresses the importance to think with a choice, when you begin to think with a choice you then get to decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what real and what is fake. You begin to live your life through you own beliefs.

Wallace wants us to live our lives differently, not in the same boring and mundane routine. In order to avoid living your adult life as a slave of your “default setting” we have to change the way we think and what we think about. If we do not change, we are a slave to our own lives.



