On September 12th, 2009 author David Foster Wallace spent the morning compiling manuscripts for his incomplete novel The Pale King whilst his wife was away setting up her art gallery. The Pale King, a novel much like Wallace’s commencement speech, is a story about tedious everyday tasks yet adds giddy humor and enlightened comprehension to ultimately achieve an understanding about life and humanity. As said in an interview with Larry McCaffery Wallace stated “Fiction’s about what it is to be a ####ing human being”. For Wallace anything was legal in his writing; insults, curse words, religion, and politics were all free range to write about. In a sense Wallace was down to earth. Not in that he was in touch with nature but instead acquainted with everyday life and wrote about it. Instead of distorting reality, Wallace instead wrote about it and aimed to find understanding from it. While Wallace was present that day at Kenyon College to tell students about what was possible with a liberal arts education he was also there to forewarn them about what was to come. In the speech that day Wallace encouraged students to take their education and apply their knowledge to everyday endeavors and not get caught up in trivial things. Through his allegories of everyday life, clichés, and commentary Wallace rouses students to think as an individual and not let life do the thinking for them. 

Wallace in his speech uses a cliché of a fish acknowledging the existence of water. The point that Wallace is trying to establish is that one must reach an acknowledgement or understanding of life. Wallace states “awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that’s what we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over” (Wallace, pg XVII). Wallace is not the only one to see this. William Wordsworth established this sense of tranquility in his writing about nature and how one must become aware and wanting of nature while Hinduism even puts a name to it called nirvana in which a state of enlightenment is attained. The common trope of all of these is they encourage followers to seek this out; Thoreau in the outdoors, Hinduism in worship, and Wallace in education. Enforcing this idea Wallace wants us to see the ins and outs of daily life and what it has to offer. 

Hidden within the text protrudes personal interpretations of life along with parables that seem to be told by the author himself fraying from a commencement speech to personal stories.  It is here that one learns about the gloomy side of this text. Upon listening to the speech one cannot discern these minute details. Only when reading the manuscript is the dismal nature unveiled. How David Wallace struggled with depression daily and was truly telling students how to avoid the grief of life’s mundane daily troubles. For he himself was facing his own struggles and this was advice for them and himself to abide by. The text states: “It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.” While this quote is heavily influenced by the subject it can be used to illustrate two important details from the text. Pertaining to his depression one can see Wallace’s struggle with depression on a personal level as his own interpretation is used here. That every day was a struggle to stay alive and for if you didn’t “boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you”. Jealousy in Wallace’s own education also appears in that he did not take his professors and courses seriously. He briefly touches on it in his speech but in an interview later that year he goes into detail his own stubbornness to engage himself in education as he assumed himself better than those teaching him. He wants the grads to not squander what a college education has given them (Larry McCaffery).

After David Foster Wallace had compiled his manuscripts he decided to take his own life on the morning of September 12th, 2009 Wallace’s wife returned to that compilation of manuscripts along with the lifeless body of Wallace. The importance of this to the impact on meaning is that in the end Foster did not adhere to his own advice. In the end depression overcame Wallace. Wallace foretold of all this trouble adult life brings and forewarns of its danger, yet Wallace did not head his own advice and life’s inconveniences were the end of him. Suddenly, parables packed with meaning become causes to his fateful demise and instances where depression and suicide are mentioned now become more prevalent to the reader. The fact of his suicide does one of two things for most readers, it either enhances the meaning of the text or it destroys it. For those whose meaning is enhanced it can be said that Wallace was truly warning students about the gloom that adult life will bring. It is up to those who read the speech themselves what the death of Wallace has on impact. 
