People’s minds are like galaxies. In these galaxies every star is an idea that was once shaped by a personal experience. Everyone’s thoughts and interpretations depend on what their going through in their lives at the moment or important things that happened in the past. Since everyone’s lives are so different, so are everyone’s thoughts.

One of the most important parts of reading is the way the reader interprets every single word. Material things like the success of a book rely on this. Why and how people like the book will highly influence how many copies are sold, etc. What is more important than this, is how a book can affect someone’s life. 

I think different usages of the word “crowded” by Wallace can cause serious effects on people’s interpretations of the whole reading. One of these effects and the one that I will focus my essay on is confusion. Confusion can cause someone to highly dislike the book, since someone ideas will not make sense. However, I think that the main effect that confusion can have is misunderstanding what the author’s message is. This is extremely relevant because this message is the reason why Wallace wrote the book. From my perspective and as I will talk more about, in “This is Water” Wallace is trying to give us advice on not living a life consisting of a boring routine. This is something that may not be so relevant to some people, but some authors may be trying to communicate to the world about a nuclear bomb that is coming along and we can be missing the message because of a misinterpretation. So yes, getting confused may be a big deal.

I picked the word “crowded” because Wallace uses it several times in his writing and with a lot of different meanings. Also, the word “crowded” is really important as he uses it to describe. Interpretation is all about describing. I will present some examples and these will guide us to different interpretations.

“So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded…” (Wallace XIII).  In this line of “This is Water”, Wallace uses the adjective in its literal sense. In this context, he’s telling us that there are a lot of people in the supermarket. Everyone should know the literal meaning of the word crowded, but not everyone necessarily interpreted it that way in this occasion. This is the first time that Wallace uses the word in his writing so there might not be confusion yet. However, it is important that the word has a literal meaning here because “crowded” is the heart of this sentence; the adjective is describing the whole situation. Understanding the situation during the whole writing is crucial since the author’s message talks about something people experiment in their every day life: routine. If people are not able to relate, the reading will make no sense and the author would have made all this work for nothing. We would have lost our time reading something that did not help us at all.

“Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines…” (Wallace XIV).  Again, Wallace uses it in its literal sense. This time he’s being a little more specific and talking about the aisles in the supermarket at the end of the day when everyone’s out of work. In my opinion, the author uses the word “crowded” so much in this reading because it’s all he is able to think about when he is tired and trying to get home from work. Even if the readers do not have any idea of how the author is feeling, they will know that the only place they want to be after a long day of work is home and the only one they want to be with is themselves; not crowded places, which clearly imply a lot of people. Wallace offers some more evidence about how he is feeling through the book as he tries to look for different ways to not only break his routine, but to not to think about it. He often writes about focusing in the lives of the ones that surround him and trying not to be so bummed about the situation he is in.

At this point, the writer has already hit the readers with the word “crowded” in the same usage two times; this has to mean something. Here is when the analyzing part becomes important, and when the readers have to make sure they understand every single word as the writer means it. The author starts to describe more and more situations with this word and not in a positive way. Every time a place is crowded he just wants to get out of there. I think that Wallace tries to make a connection with the readers through the word crowded, since almost everyone can relate to a situation when they do not want to be surrounded by a bunch of people, regardless of the reason. 

“It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life…” (Wallace XV).  The usage of the word crowded in this line is not so literal anymore. The parts of adult life are not a place, therefore they cannot be crowded with people the same way the supermarket and the aisles were. In this context, Wallace is trying to tell us that it is one of the moments of an adult’s life where there is always something going on. That part of life where you are really tired and there is that one additional thing to do before you go home to get some rest and, since you are so tired, that last thing seems to be taking forever which is really frustrating, as he mentions right before the word “crowded”. Here is when confusion may come. There are a lot of people in this world who take every single word by its literal meaning. This may be because this is how they were taught as kids, or for other reasons. I believe that Wallace is using the word as a synonym of “stressing”. That may be because I have learned that from my personal experiences as a child; a crowded place was always stressful. However, everyone can have different interpretations of this usage of the word; specially after the word was used differently earlier in the reading. 

The word “crowded” can also be used as a verb, unfortunately Wallace doesn’t use it that way in his writing. For example, “everyone crowded around the trophy”. It no longer means that there are a lot of people, but that they came closer together. May be it is a good thing that he did not hit the readers with so many usages of the word; less analysis is needed and the message of the writer is more clear.

I came to the conclusion that Wallace went from the literal use of the word to a very figurative one to make the readers have the necessity to analyze his writing in order to comprehend it and get something out of it.  It was very easy for me to understand what he was tying to say because I like to visualize scenarios and words while I am reading. He repeated the word so many times I already had the picture in my head and the rest of the situations were easy to interpret. Wallace used the word “crowded” to describe every situation and always gave it a very negative sense. Once the reader understands that, the message is a lot clearer; do not put yourself in situations you will feel “crowded”.