Close-Reading of a Literary Text: In David Wallace’s This Is Water he is trying to get the reader to understand how to think. Liberal arts more about teaching how to think, not so much of trying to fill you up with knowledge. The author does a great job with imagery throughout this text. Here he tells me there are two guys, which mean there are two points of views. Also, he is trying to drive that you should never let your attitude determine the way you think. We as people, tend to have an automatic way of thinking and the author describes this as a default setting. He repeats this at least seven times throughout the text as a form of repetition or to strengthen the imagery of this. David Wallace also uses personification to examine and paint a better picture of how humans behave when they are in their default setting. In addition to this he uses metaphors to help compare and help you visualize exactly how he views things when he gets in his default setting. Now I will explain how these three things create imagery to highlight the meaning of the text.

In terms of repetition he introduces the term default setting as something that we are born with. He feels as human we all have a natural default setting. To the author default setting brings negativity to the mind. For example, when I sit in traffic after a long day I automatically get upset and began to name call out my window. I truly never really mean to its just kind of a natural reaction to be upset due to fatigue. The author advises the reader not to get sucked into this mindset which is called default setting. He advises us to activate thinking. Here Wallace states, “again, please don’t think I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It will take effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you will just flat out won’t want to.” If you learn how to activate thinking, then you will learn there are a lot more option. You may actually maybe be a bit surprised on how thinking positive can and will actually affect your day. An example of positive thinking can be Floyd Mayweather. He never thinks of losing and he has never been defeated. Mayweather has been in 49 battles and has come out victorious of 49 battles. Mr. Mayweather shows no examples of default settings.

In our everyday life, we may go to the grocery store on an average of two times a month. Out of those two times we are tired maybe two out of two times. In terms of personification David Wallace, uses a cow to represent how people are always in his way, and how slowly they move. As he stands in line he uses cows as people to describe how big and how slow the people were moving. His mindset is obviously negative because he is in his default setting, and he chooses not to activate is thinking. Also cows run of their default setting because they don’t think like we do and all they do is eat and stand around. I feel like this is a strong representation of people and a strong use of personification because it hits right on point with how I think daily.

David Wallace commencement speech opens up with a metaphor about two fish who pass a larger fish. The fish askes the two other fish “Morning boys. How’s the water?”. Now the two fish are in their default setting because they are confused by his question. One of them turns to the other and goes “what the hell is water?”. This gives me the impression that the fish live in water so it’s just normal to them, just like our surroundings as humans they don’t think about it, but the big fish does because every day he activates his thinking. From my view I would want to be the big fish because he activates his thinking, and I do not feel it is difficult to activate my thinking every day. The whole time the author is trying to teach us to be the big fish and not the small fish. This metaphor helps build imagery and also may cause you to activate your thinking after reading it.

In conclusion, throughout David Wallace’s text he constantly mentions default setting to drive into the reader’s head that it is an automatic way of thinking for us human. He uses imagery to help drive his point across. Personification, metaphors, and repetition were all used to help paint pictures of what David Wallace is trying to get across to the reader. His whole point of the story was to teach people how to activate their thinking so when they are tired they have positive thoughts. In my opinion this is a great text because it has great message on the way we should face controversy in our life every day.
