Within the unfinished manuscript of the Late David Foster Wallace’s, The Pale King, He is quoted as saying, “How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.” I don’t mean to deviate from my intended discussion from the start; However, I believe it to be crucial that I make it clear that Wallace was one of the utmost renowned, yet tormented philosophers of the modern era. This quote brings light to who he was as a person and that was a frustrated soul who foresaw life for its deeper meaning, nevertheless he never felt that he could present his knowledge to others well enough. His hindrance grew more evident towards the later portion of his short life and it very sadly culminated with him taking his own life. With all of this said, Wallace was no perfect human being and while he may have seen human life in a different light, his perspective was absolutely not universally true. Being able to think and operate on a healthy plane of existence is imperative and even though he preached his new version of thought and action, he failed to operate on his own healthy plane. In 2005, Wallace delivered his illustrious commencement address on the stage looking out onto hundreds of soon to be Kenyon College graduates. This speech left a massive impact on the literary community across the country and, possibly to some extents, the world. During my close reading and listening of this speech many things stood out to me, but just one question was interminably reoccurring. Was that speech entirely appropriate to present to graduates transcending undergraduate education and, assumedly for the majority of them, into the grasps of the already feared “real world”? Wallace concedes at several different points in the speech that he isn’t this omniscient deity to tell the graduates what to think or what to do, but he does speak with an arrogant undertone. The conclusion that I have arrived at is that beneath the incredible diction and deliverance, reeks an empty soul that was unable to grip the everyday pleasures of the corporate “routine” that he references numerous times within “This Is Water”. Again, his depression sadly came to fruition in 2008 and due to this ill-fated fact, the effectiveness and the appropriation of this famous speech should be brought into question, especially considering the setting. 

I hope that my point has been made abundantly clear, that while I disagree with the all around tone and mood of the speech, I do believe that the diction, the imagery, and several of the metaphorical examples hold some weight directed at an audience of this description. The overlying message in Wallace’s piece was that “There is more value to be found in this degree than the money that the student will receive from the job he or she acquires upon graduation” (Carolina Reader Fall 2015, Pg. XII). He makes this argument because he believes in the universal truth that no one can strip you of your education and it will always be apart of you henceforth. I hold firmly to this truth as well, however, he takes his point a little further when he implores his audience to understand that there is no one way to learn how to think, but everyone must learn how to apply some definitive control over how and what they think. This may seem contradictory, but this advisory comment by itself is quite helpful because if you cannot exhibit power over your own thoughts, the terrible master that the mind is will take over and run rampant. It is within this section of his speech that he reiterates the deficiency of the human “default-setting” and this is also the point in the speech where he loses my vote for circumstantial appropriation. He references a generalized parameter about adult suicide and uses it in order to accentuate the the value of the graduating class’ liberal-arts education. And if that wasn’t already a red flag to most people, it gets even more eerie, but please understand that this requires the use of hindsight. Wallace said, “And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger” (Wallace XIII). Are we supposed to believe that Wallace was not dead when he addressed the Kenyon College graduating class of 2005? Why as college English students do we almost universally deify a man who can preach about a subject as if he has it understood, when in reality he is worse off than the majority of the adult population? I am not discrediting the late David Foster Wallace as a profound thinking philosopher, but I am moving forward the notion that this speech should, at the very least, be taken with a grain of salt. He was a man among the minority of the population preaching to a stratified sampling of graduates as if it were commonplace to have a tormented “default-setting”. There is a time and place for the speech he presented and a commencement ceremony of any kind is not that. 

Given Wallace’s physiological state of mind, I did not grant him enough concession for the latter theme of his speech hitting on the idea of cancelling out negativity and embracing empathy. Toward the end of his speech, he began to touch on the idea that when in control over your thoughts, you should make a conscious effort to not look at the world through your self-centered camera angle. Self-centered thinking, while it sounds like self preservation in a “dog eat dog” world, actually causes the average individual more stress and anger. He asks every graduate to go into the world with the open-mindedness to view the world from the point of view of everyone and everything else around them. In doing this, the world will brighten and everything that goes wrong through the course of a normal day won’t feel so personal or spiteful, but maybe even brushed off as daily pleasantry. 

In 2008, the world lost a very enlightened thinker of the modern day because his tormented mind could not be controlled and to him he believed that no one quite understood his deep thinking process. Wallace’s mind possibly contained all of the secrets to living successfully and living happily, but he was unable to bare the information across to the common individual. I will always concede to his clearly present intuition and intelligence, but for the sake of the argument of appropriation, he gave this speech to the wrong people at the wrong point in his short life. The concept of a commencement speech is open-ended, but in general the idea is to propel the nerve ridden graduate through the threshold of undergraduate education into the workforce using experiential advice, fair warning, and general motivation. Despite the clear imagery and metaphors, “This Is Water” failed to accomplish the task the commencement address asks you to complete in order to be an effective speaker. 