“This is Water,” by David Foster Wallace, is a great commencement speech that Wallace presented at a college graduation. It was later published as a short piece, so that the public could read it. The speech consists of effective techniques that are also used by other well-known authors. These methods Wallace uses are meant to persuade his audience to accept his opinions and thoughts, to make them their own. The devices he applies to achieve this are hooking the reader, allowing the reader to relate to his ideas, creation of a conversation through a subtle argumentative claim, and strategic word and diction choice. All of these approaches are well-organized and structured in order to support his claims and thoughts throughout his speech, in order to provide a meaningful dialogue for the college graduates. He later states that the speech is not meant to be inspirational, but to many people and myself, I find the piece to be the most inspirational and memorable text I’ve read so far in my academic career. 

Wallace starts the speech with a short paragraph about two fish that are swimming aimlessly through the water in their goldfish bowl. They swim for a while and a wise fish comes along to say something along the lines of “How’s the water boys?” The fish swim on and one eventually becomes aware and asks the other “What the hell is water?” (Wallace). This is the introduction to the text, leaving a pause between this paragraph and the next. This is efficient because he hooks the reader to cause an interest in what comes next. The audience will possibly wonder in their head “why is he talking about fish in a commencement speech?” He goes on to tell the reader that he does not mean to act as the wise fish in the bowl from the beginning, but that the goldfish story is meant to help the readers realize something important. Wallace wants the audience to be aware that life’s realities surround them and are usually hard to pin-point, explain, or see them right in front of their face. This explanation provides a hint of the expectation of what the piece will be about; a commencement speech that is meant to speak to the people on a level of awareness, but also not meant to be taken as him suggesting what will make their lives “better.”   

Next, he talks about the negative aspects of the automatic thoughts that he, and most people, can relate to. Wallace believes that people tend to habitually think that everything that happens in the world is about them. That people subconsciously have confidence that they are the “absolute center of the universe” (Wallace). He tells of his idea that we are not supposed to recognize and speak of this phenomenon around people and in society because it is not socially accepted. It is perceived that doing so is repulsive and gives a person a reputation of bad character. Even though this thought may be true, the audience can probably relate to this but do not want to accept or tell others that they do, and they keep it to themselves. This part is super effective because he makes it personal for the reader and they can relate and think back to realize “yeah I do that a lot actually.” At the same time, it makes the reader think “okay and what about it?” They wonder what point he is trying to make and want to keep reading to find out.  Then he gives what is in my opinion, the most significant part of the speech. He claims that this default setting he talks about, is actually wired into human’s brains at birth. I personally can’t tell if he means this literally or if he is just making an unsupported claim. Either way, it delivers an opportunity for the creation of an argument about whether or not a person can support the “automatic pilot” mode being stemmed at birth, or if society is the reason a person is shaped to act this way. I can personally make my argument that society creates it, and that is why I, at this point, began to be drawn into the piece. What Wallace provides with this technique is a construction of a conversation the reader can make with other readers, or with themselves. I think this is a clever method to use in an academic piece such as Wallace has written.

Wallace transitions from the previous points by explaining that what he describes in the next parts of his speech will help the audience see through a “lens of self” that will help them be aware of how they operate automatically. Instead of speaking of encouragement during this graduation speech, Wallace says that college is dangerous because students tend to over analyze things and make them complicated, rather than see what is going on right in front of them. Wallace says that he knows this because he experienced it in his academic career. After this he makes an even more significant assertion by saying that people usually get lost in their own head. He states that there is a “constant monologue inside your own head” (Wallace), which some people can relate with but not all. This being the case, what he states delivers a glimpse of how Wallace processes conditions in his own life. If you fast forward into his life you would find out that he commits suicide, and that makes this piece more ironic than anything because he provides an opportunity for the audience to have a moment of self-realization that he has made, but it did not work for him. When I look back on when he talks about how wrapped up in his head he gets, I gain an understanding of how depressed he truly was throughout his life, and I acquire a feeling of why he might contemplate life the way he does. He goes on to discuss about how the “liberal-arts cliché” of training a person how to think really makes people learn how to think, which allows a person to control their default setting that Wallace talks about. In the same paragraph he states “. . . most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger” (Wallace). Going back and reading this line after learning of Wallace’s suicide is eye opening because it definitely gives a different feel and approach to reading his speech over again. In the back of my mind I take his personal life into consideration when reading the speech, and at the same time I feel the text is so “mind-blowing” for me because unfortunately, the event adds even more personality to the piece.

Next, Wallace says that it may seem like he has been exaggerating, but he is about to get “concrete” in the next part of his speech. He states that commencement speeches are supposed to talk about adult life after graduating and making it in the real world, pursuing your dreams and reaching your goals. I think that Wallace’s speech is different from the usual because he states that the realities and “boredom, routine, and petty frustration” (Wallace), follow after college, but he still follows the structure of how a graduation speech should be at the same time. The word choice he uses is also effective in this because it targets growing up as a bad thing rather than good.

The next paragraph is a long example of an average day in the adult life in Wallace’s view. His example is a person getting up early for work just to be tired and stressed at the end of a long workday, then to sit in traffic another hour and then realize that they need to go to the grocery store. He says that once they get to the grocery store the lights are so bright that they would get a headache, the aisles are crowded, the cart is “junky,” and there are old people and screaming children everywhere. He tops the horrid scene off with the checkout lines all being full and long, the “have a nice day” phrase sounding like death, the crowded and disgusting parking lot, and the slow traffic on the way home. The entire scenario is effective because it is so realistic and tangible for people in the audience to relate to. The word choice and diction Wallace uses is important because it gives the entire feel of the scene. Awful words that string together with three adjectives at a time make the example even more cringe worthy, for example “. . . crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot. . .” (Wallace). Littery is not even a word, which means that he made the word up, but the meaning is still understood by the reader because it might be a word that people use when talking, just not writing, which gives the text a more casual approach. 

Finally, he gives the same exact situation described before, but this time Wallace provides different examples of ways people can avoid the stress of the scene entirely. He asks the audience to put themselves in other people’s shoes in order to give a solution to the “default – setting” problem he presents throughout the text. This is the “AHA” moment for readers because they can clarify exactly what his point is in making all of these negative opinions, arguments, and thoughts about people and society as a whole. He again states that he is not trying to get people to think they need to act the way he describes, but he instead tries to tell his audience that this is an option for people who want to begin to consciously decide how they want to live their lives, automatic, or being aware.

In the end, he states that his piece was not inspirational or it was not meant to be, but actually the piece was incredibly inspiring and moving to most people, including myself. He calls the things he stated in the reading “bullshit” and that it was simply about awareness. Wallace comes back to the goldfish story in the beginning by saying we need to remind ourselves over and over “This is water, this is water” (Wallace).