Over the length of time, many people have been asked to give speeches for all sorts of events. Speeches are made to deliver a formal address to a group of people or audience, and in 2005 David Foster Wallace gave a speech to Kenyon College’s graduating class. This speech changed the audience’s perception of the world as he gave a different view of what the outcome of a liberal education should entail. When considering a liberal arts education, we think about how people learn to deal with the wider world, and all the change and diversity that comes along with it. Wallace then ties up the idea of a liberal arts education in his speech by giving detailed examples, discussing the fundamentals of an adult’s unconscious mind, and presenting a symbolic proposal of what water signifies in his speech.

 Throughout Wallace’s dialogue he puts strict emphasis on living a compassionate life with a completed liberal education degree and to do so he gave many examples that caught the eye of not one but many in the crowd. One example was when he recapped on an average day for an adult. He spoke about all the troubling thoughts no one usually says out loud but is aware of their existence. Wallace says “maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer…” (XV). This statement indicated how Wallace branches out to the audience and allows them to picture this scene and what their thoughts would be if they were there witnessing this firsthand and how they would proceed to think about the events happening in this story. He then continues to talk about “the adult world” and how unimaginably hard it is to survive in it, because of the difficulty in this time in life, many people depend on their education to bring them to the conclusions they make and how to approach a problem when they see one. Within the speech Wallace gives multiple examples of how our education gives meaning to our point of view, how the same experience can mean two totally different things or present two different ideas to each and every one of us. He uses these examples as a way for us to know how much the education we earn affects the everyday lives of the world and how important it is for us to actually earn a liberal art education.  

The unconscious mind plays a large role in how everyone goes about their ordinary day. When people are born they come already set as Wallace refers to “default settings” and these settings are placed in the brain to interpret how we see the world. He says “The world as you experience, it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor” (XII). Wallace uses this expression to make the audience aware of how unconsciously they perceive that they are the center of the universe and how everything revolves around us. With that statement we conclude that he is most certainly correct when he began talking about the obvious things in day to day life that often are the hardest to talk about. As he continues talking about our unconscious, he depicts small parts in his monologue that make the audience stop and realize that they’re doing exactly what he is talking about, which is exactly what he is trying to convey to the audience. It’s that moment where we stop and think “he’s actually right” that ties this whole concept of default settings together in our minds and allows us to think differently for a moment and possibly want to change our settings.

Earlier when Wallace began his speech he told a story about two fish that found themselves asking “what the hell is water?” (X), this statement allowed Wallace to slowly progress into his concept of a liberal arts education. He says “It is the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness…” (XVII). This passage continued to back up his theme of a liberal education with a fact that he often struggles with being aware and that it is something not all people can do, something he battles with almost always every day. That explains why he uses the concept of water because water is so transparent and so obvious that it is often hard to see what is hidden in plain sight. His theory of water comes back to the idea of our unconscious mind and gives examples of how hard it is to talk about the things we do not usually speak of, simply because they are the most obvious things we just assume not to talk about. 

David Foster Wallace introduced this speech as a good way to talk about liberal arts and how much an education like that is valued. Valued not just by the people who have already earned a degree like this but as a way to show the graduating class how this degree has multiple uses. He allowed the audience to be aware of the degree they have received and the value that comes with it. He uses his theme of a liberal education to inform, not just the audience, but all the readers of how important it is to be tentative and aware of the world around them. Wallace used good examples to talk about how hard it is to have an unconscious mind that is automatically set to think a certain way, but backed them up in a way that lead to him explaining what water is and how having an education is so important in today’s world. 