
Throughout, the entire 2005 commencement address, written by the author David Foster Wallace, the reader is suddenly introduced into the concepts of both self-awareness and cognizance of the world around them. The author of this commencement address, David Foster Wallace, was a novelist, born in 1962, who wrote a speech entitled This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. Wallace’s argument was that many college graduates, who were about to enter the “real world” were not prepared to be aware of their world, there by not being compassionate to those events. This commencement address displays the author’s ideas through stories of the two fish, Alaskan men, people gathered in the grocery store on a weekday evening, and how they amass to becoming self-aware thereby fostering compassion.

Immediately within the first paragraph of the commencement address Foster Wallace alludes to the reader about the concept of self-awareness. In the following quote the reader and the audience is introduced to two young fish who are unaware that for all of their young lives they lived in water. “There are two young fish swimming along… “Morning, boys How’s the water?” ...What the hell is water?” (Wallace X) In the preceding quote the author refers to the unawareness of the fish, even with something as simple as the fact that they live in a body of water. Therefore, because of the fishes’ unawareness, Wallace adds that the two even asked the question “What the hell is water?” (Wallace X) In this passage, Wallace is pressing the audience towards the fact that most of the time in life the “average joe” fails to be aware of what is going on in the world around them.

 Later on, the reader is introduced to another occurrence of the deficiency of awareness, when Wallace speaks about the story of two arguing men sitting at a bar in Alaskan wilderness. In the fourth paragraph, the audience is presented a story of two men in an Alaskan bar arguing about the existence of God or a God-like figure. “…the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God…I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard…cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a god…I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.” (Wallace XI) In this particular quote, the reader discovers how the atheist man is unaware of what he actually puts his faith in. Even though he claims to not believe in a “god”, he prays to one which he is reminded of by the religious man in the bar. 

In the latter segment of this speech the audience is given another example of unawareness when a person leaves work after a long, exhausting day just to only waste more of their precious time at a grocery store. “…consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am…some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.” (Wallace XV) To recapitulate the passage that surrounds the preceding quote, Wallace gives a story of a person who is a white-collar, college-graduate who works at a challenging eight to ten-hour job. And of course at the end of those eight to ten hours the person is tired and ready to go home for a meal and sleep. The audience later hears how the person ends up having to stop by the grocery store on a busy afternoon, and due to this they are frustrated to see the sea of people who are in the supermarket doing the same thing for the same reasons. Slowly in this passage, and in later passages, Wallace is beginning to sneak in the idea of being aware so that one can become more compassionate to others around them. 

In the concluding moments of this spoken essay, Wallace proclaims that getting an actual education is about having “simple awareness”. Wallace, by the close of the address, presents to the reader that through awareness as people, there should a certain level of compassion for what’s going on. This can be seen in the previous example given, the story of the exhausted adult in the grocery store. In that story, compassion comes into play when the person who waits in the slow line and realizes that everyone is else is in the same predicament that they are in, on top of that the whole herd of people are trying to get home, cook, eat, and go to sleep just like the exhausted person is. Thereby, proving that when awareness is present, compassion is usually present as well. 

Dictionary.com states that the root word, aware, means having knowledge; conscious; cognizant; this was Wallace’s main driving point to the graduates of Keyon College. While being aware comes compassion; which means “a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune…” (Dictionary.com). Wallace argued to the graduates, entering the “real world”, were not actually aware of the world around them, which presented a lack of compassion. This commencement address displayed the author’s thoughts of awareness and compassion through stories, such as, of the two fish, the Alaskan men, the people gathered in the grocery store on a weekday evening; and how this accrues to becoming self-aware thereby fostering compassion.