“This is Water” is a commencement address given to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon University orated by David Foster Wallace. Wallace had a vast and intriguing career. After publishing his infamous novel Infinite Jest, it had been named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923-2005. “This is Water” conveys many meanings on the aspect of viewing other people’s lives depending on the reader’s/listener’s interpretation. However, after connecting key statements made throughout the speech one can soon trace how this speech could have been a precursor to David Wallace’s eventual death. Having already known Wallace committed suicide in 2008 from autobiographical research, it soon becomes quite obvious that this speech can be related to his own self depression. Not until you take an intensive look at the ironic double-sided meaning of the perspectives of life through an exterior view, you cannot truly understand Wallace’s underlying theme of his own depression. 

Although this is opinion based, parables or analogies are often a fun and easy way to convey complex meanings to a greater audience like teaching children how it isn’t moral to lie or how genesis teaches Christians the story of creation. After a few short whimsical remarks Wallace begins his speech by telling an analogy of these fish who were oblivious as to what water is. Wallace states “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”(X). In plain terms this means that you don’t know the background of the person you pass on the street or the girl that sits in front of you on the bus. After commenting on his first story and on the average liberal arts education, Wallace dives into another “didactic little story”(XI) about a religious man and an atheist chatting at a bar. Ultimately the atheist gets caught up in a horrible blizzard and desperately calls out for God and he is eventually saved by Eskimos randomly passing through the blizzard. The religious man viewed this as an act of God, but since the atheist didn’t literally see God save him he is still a nonbeliever. “The exact same experience can mean two totally different thing to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.”(XI)This is a complementary analogy of Wallace highlighting the “obvious theme” of not judging others based on their cover because we can only experience the world through our own perspective; this story adds a factor of being open minded to someone else’s opinions or beliefs. He describes thinking as a tool and thinking “really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”(XIII) This topic of thinking leads him to describing a familiar scene that relates to the “obvious theme” of experiencing life through an alternative perspective. Wallace starts off by describing the “average adult day”(XIII). You get up early in the morning go to your average nine-to-five job and after work when you’re already tired and stressed you have to attend to other responsibilities outside your job like grocery shopping. After sitting in rush hour traffic to even get to the store, the store is already swamped from the other nine-to-five commuters. After maneuvering through the populated store getting your groceries, even waiting in line to pay and talking to the cashier in a somewhat personable voice is a strenuous task. Everyone can relate to this scenario because everyone is only worried about their own lives. He offers to the listener/reader the question of don’t you think everyone in that grocery store is thinking the same thing. The philosophical Wallace relates the idea of what to think about to the “obvious theme” of viewing life from an exterior point of view and respecting it in a way we can all relate too. 

Transitioning from the obvious meaning of the text to the “dark” underlying theme of Wallace’s own depression we realize this theme is harder to identify. One particular example that just sticks out on the page is when Wallace said “If you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over made up lady who just screamed at her kids in the checkout line.”(XV). This can obviously be interpreted as a hidden indicator of what Wallace was warning us about. The speech was addressed to Kenyon College which is a liberal arts school in Ohio so it is likely that most of the graduates probably knew much about Wallace’s stature, but it is ironic that they didn’t know anything about his depression. After his death, the audience finally gets to realize Wallace’s true meaning of the parables. They translate the meaning of not knowing about other people’s backgrounds, but there was no way the audience just could have assumed he was depressed. That is why I think Wallace incorporates a key phrase right at the beginning of the speech “If anybody feels like perspiring, I’d advise you to go ahead because I’m sure going to.”(X) he quickly acknowledges a human trait that all humans share. That is a low key aspect that goes along with the “obvious theme” but, goes under the radar while reading the passage. The fact that we are all human and it is almost in our biology to only care about ourselves is what causes these irking situation that occur in the grocery store. Finally the most important statement that he said that foreshadowed his suicide was when he was talking about when humans commit suicide with a firearm they usually shoot in the head. “They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”(XIII). This can’t be a coincidence he is almost blatantly foreshadowing his death. Some would argue that why would Wallace choose this particular speech out of all of his works to subliminally convey his depression, but the argument against that is that we can see the connection the “obvious theme” and his subliminal message have in common.

Maybe Wallace never even thought about suicide during 2005 while giving this speech or maybe he was depressed long before this either way as you can see there is various instances where you can possibly identify his self-depression. Having said this one thing is certain and it is no one can or will find out David Foster Wallace’s true intention for the speech but, I feel leaving the ceremony the graduate’s all had something to think about in the future. 
