
“This is Water” by David Foster Wallace is a depressing but truthful speech about the future, that was given to a class of graduating college students. The reason this piece is so depressing is because he speaks of the everyday routine of an average adult life  and how repetition is the bane of humanity. Underneath the ugly truths of life that he states, there is an underlying word that most overlook when reading or listening to the speech. The word “death” comes up a lot throughout the speech, where other nouns could be placed instead. The reason he uses the word “death” is to insight his future because 3 years after delivering this speech, he killed himself, so by analyzing this text for word repetition and word choice, a reader is able to realize that Wallace’s subconscious would sneak these words into his writing in order to convey his state of mind and try to call out for help in a way.

The first instance when the word “Death” comes up is in the second paragraph of the piece. He uses it when he says “...banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning”(XI), which is quite an over exaggeration since it’s not of life or death importance to make over repeated remarks. Instead of using the over exaggeration of “life or death”, he could have just said “banal platitudes can be quite important…”. This over-exaggerated statement from the passage insists that he is in a much darker place than he is letting on and he is subconsciously adding in a death related remark to his speech; this is how he is trying to convey his state of mind, which he is thinking about death.

Later in the speech, he again speaks of his state of mind when he says “And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you”(XVI), which shows how he thinks he will not be grieved until he died. This is another way of him conveying his state of mind to the audience, since he talks of how he sees death conceptually. When he says death in this context, it isn’t needed to convey the point that he was trying to pose, in fact, it kind of just makes the statement even more negative and pessimistic, which isn’t exactly ok because he’s giving a commencement speech. Since he put in something so unnecessary to the speech, as a reader, one could tell that he is suffering from some type of depression where he thinks he is not good enough.

Since he thinks of himself as he does through depression, his subconscious starts to make a stand when he says “...you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death”(XIV), this is when he is speaking of his trips to the supermarket, but he gives imagery of the grim reaper or death, as a character instead of a concept, to the cashier. One wouldn’t normally describe someone’s voice as the voice of death, so this is when the reader can realize that he is actually thinking about death and he slipped up and he is unintentionally trying to call out for help in a way that is not blatantly obvious to the audience. Again, it was not entirely necessary for him to describe the cashier’s voice as death, instead he could of said it was the voice of boredom.

Throughout the whole speech, he brings up life and death almost 3 times. He first says that “None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death”(XVI-XVII). He then later states that “The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death”(XVII). In  a way, he is a little hypocritical in these two sentences since he is now dead by his own hands and didn’t exactly experience all of life before death; this also indicates that he thought a lot about that big fancy question of life after death. This is his subconscious trying to voice his state of mind in a way that is more obvious because it was not necessary for him to include that observation in his list about morality, religion, and dogma. He is again unintentionally hinting at his future suicide with the repetition of the word death throughout this piece. 

This speech was originally depressing because it described to college graduates what they had waiting for them in their adult life; now eleven years later, it is even more depressing because there are indicators of Wallace’s very dark future. The thing is no one had any inkling of an idea that he would kill himself because it was expertly hidden away in this speech and many other pieces of his work. His subconscious laid a trail of “breadcrumbs” in order for the audience to eventually find out. This speech alone contained many “breadcrumbs”, such as word repetition and certain word choice, that would describe his state of mind and call out for help in a way, but his issues went unchecked because no one realized the subtlety of his wording that indicated his later death.
