Almost every human being is guilty of constantly thinking a certain way. Most individuals just think in an automatic manner that puts ourselves as the main focus of every situation we experience. Rarely do we consider others and what they’re experiencing themselves. Usually, people are barely even aware of the egocentric ways they so easily think about their experiences and situations. David Foster Wallace exposes this default way of thinking in his speech, “This is Water”. By looking at the fourth and second to last paragraph of his speech, we can see Wallace’s use of illustrated examples, which is important because it conveys his message to the audience that we are in complete and total control of the way we think.  

A main goal of Wallace’s speech is to make the listener aware that we, as humans, often view the world as revolving around us. As we go about our day-to-day lives, following our personal routines, we experience everything from our own point of view. This makes it extremely easy for us to only consider our own perspectives and not the perspectives of others. Wallace uses the phrase “default setting” (3) to describe this manner of thought. We constantly view others as in our way, inconveniencing us. We seldom think that it is us who may be in the way of other people because it is uncomfortable and unfamiliar for us to primarily consider what others are going through over what we are going through. This brings us to the main point of Wallace’s speech, which is that each individual person is in control of their thoughts and that they have the choice to change the way they think. Wallace supports his point by concluding, 

“It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: 

‘This is water’. 

‘This is water’” (17). 

Wallace is illustrating that we have to make the conscious decision to be aware of others and the world around us. This is what is meant when Wallace tells us to remind ourselves “this is water”, which is referring to an illustrated example that he opens his speech with. The joke includes a fish swimming past another fish, mentioning the water, and the other fish inquires, “what is water?” The fish has been surrounded by water its whole life, so it never even thought to consider what exactly it has been engulfed in all the time. This relates to the way humans rarely think of what others are going through and why they have to consciously make themselves aware of their surroundings. This reference to the joke at the end of the speech is a perfect way to reflect back on the introduction of the speech and tie the whole passage together. 

Wallace also uses illustrated examples to support his central message that we are in complete and total control of how we think and what we think about at a different point in his speech. More towards the beginning of his speech, Wallace illustrates another story that depicts two men sitting at a bar. An atheist tells a religious man of a time he was lost in the wilderness during a blizzard and how he cried out to God for help. Eskimos later showed up and showed him back to camp. The religious man was sure that this was God placing the Eskimos in the man’s path to save him, while the atheist just believed that he happened to run into a group of Eskimos that helped him find his way back. The point of Wallace’s inclusion of this story is evident as he goes on to explain, “…the exact same experience can mean totally two different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience” (11). The example of this story expresses how two different individuals can perceive the same experience in completely different ways. The meaning these two people derive from this experience comes from within their own conscious streams of thought and their personal belief systems. This story is a perfect example of how the same situation can be interpreted in different ways. Both of the individuals in this tale chose to think the way they did about the experience of the man lost in the blizzard. This supports the central theme of Wallace’s speech because it emphasizes how one is in control of the way they think about an experience. Expanding further on Wallace’s main point, these two individuals could take one another’s view into consideration. The atheist could make the conscious decision to consider that maybe God was, in fact, the reason that he encountered the Eskimos in his time of need. Likewise, the religious man could consider the thoughts of the atheist and think that maybe Eskimos just happened to pass by the atheist while he was lost in the woods and were able to guide him back to safety. Choosing to get passed one’s own default setting of thinking and considering the perceptions of others is the main focus of Wallace’s speech. 

Through the use of illustrated examples, David Foster Wallace supported the main theme of this speech that he relayed to the graduating class of 2005 at Kenyon College. He shed light on the fact that humans automatically think a certain way, usually only perceiving themselves as the center of the universe. He also made the audience realize that we have the choice to think differently; we can think of all the others that surround us and what they are experiencing. The examples of the fish joke and the story of the men in the bar helped Wallace support his claim.
