
Toward the end of his speech This Is Water, David Foster Wallace explains that every person governs their own mind when he says, “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship” (XVI). Wallace gave this speech as a commencement address to the graduating class of Kenyon College in 2005. Usually commencement addresses are given by very accomplished individuals and David Foster Wallace certainly was. However, people would not find out till later on that though he was accomplished, he was actually broken on the inside. Sadly, just three years later, Wallace committed suicide after dealing with depression. I did not know this until after I read his speech, and I found that it made it even more fascinating that you could truly tell from his words that he was unhappy with himself. With his biography in mind, looking closely at what Wallace is saying, almost all of the situations in life that he mentions are actually his own experiences. The more and more you listen to it or read it, you can identify patterns throughout that prove Wallace was suffering in his adult life even though he may seem like a successful writer on the outside. Ultimately, it extended as far as suicide for Wallace but his message was clear. Through the use of imagery and diction, David Foster Wallace’s This is Water speech warned the graduating students that they control how they think and not to let the hardships of everyday life dictate how they feel like he did. 

In the beginning of This is Water, Wallace talks about the true value of education. Instead of just walking away from college with a degree, he believes that it is through your education, especially college, that you learn how to think before you enter into the real world. He explains, “Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education…is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff…instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me” (XII). By learning how to think in college, Wallace believes it will be easier later in life when you are going through adult life. He describes learning to think as “being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience” (XIII). Once you have learned to think, it will change your experiences in adult life and ultimately help you be less self-centered. After Wallace talks about this he uses imagery to paint the picture of a disturbing situation in the audience’s mind. He explains that “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves 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). Once I knew that Wallace had committed suicide, this quote was a red flag to me. This is a clear example of how Wallace believed that if you couldn’t control your mind and how you think it could lead as far as that and it did with him. This is why he describes your education as being more important than just the face value of a degree and to really use it as a path to living a fulfilling life. 

Throughout This is Water, Wallace stresses that thinking about yourself a lot and putting yourself first is not always your fault. He uses diction to repeatedly mention throughout the speech it is your “natural default setting” when you think this way. He frequently use these words in his speech, explaining that the hard thing to do in life is to not always think this way. He encourages the graduating students to try and step into the shoes of other people instead of assuming you know everything. Another example of Wallace using imagery is when he portrays being in a supermarket after a long day of work where people judge everyone around them like they are better than them. Through the imagery he explains there is more than one way to interpret a situation and to look differently at the “fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line…Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer” (XV). Wallace uses a lot of detail so that the audience can picture this scene. Rather than thinking everyone is below you, you should consider that you don’t know what exactly is going on in their lives’. Wallace clarifies, “please don’t think you are supposed to think this way…Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort and if you’re like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to” (XV). This part of the speech makes it clear that Wallace felt like he was the person he is challenging the students not to be. He would judge everyone in the supermarket and think his problems and struggles were more important than the lady screaming at her kid or anyone else waiting on line like him. However, he emphasizes that it is not easy to get away from our “default settings”, and to think in a new way is challenging. 

Wallace’s This is Water should be interpreted as a challenge for people to control what they think and to understand that adult life is difficult. By learning how to think it will help them in the long run because they will be able to control their “default setting” and look at things from a point of view other than theirs. Learning how to think starts with your education and prepares you for the day in, day out adult life. Wallace tries to guide the graduating students away from the judgements and experiences that he made through his life. Even though he says in his speech, “it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way” (XIV), he wants people to realize that you could be in someone else’s way sometimes and to think about them. Though Wallace might have felt like he didn’t do this in his life, he justifies that “It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything this lens of self” (XII).  
