In the short story “This is Water,” the author, David Foster Wallace, describes a life where most humans are in a natural default setting. This default setting is going through the day to day motions only truly thinking about oneself. Wallace wants his readers to start being more aware of themselves and of others to escape this default setting he is describing. He believes to live a better life one must be aware of other people’s thoughts and feelings and not just their own. David Foster Wallace portrays the theme of awareness and consciousness of others by using choice diction, asyndeton, and anecdotes from his everyday life and experiences.

The diction Wallace uses jumps out at the reader because of how varied it is. He uses words and phrases that seem to be made up by him. He refers to US commencement speeches as “little parable-ish stories” (Wallace x) that “turn out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre” (x). By putting those two sentence fragments in the second paragraph of this short story Wallace is creating an immediate draw to the text. His word choice throws the reader off and makes them continue reading. He uses the phrase “capital-T True” multiple times in the story when referring to the natural default setting that he believes most of the human race is in. When Wallace states “the only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get decide how you’re gonna try to see it,” (xv) he is talking about how people see life. He is saying that each individual person sees life how they want to see it. He makes this a point by using his own, maybe not grammatically correct, English with words such as “gonna” and “bullshitty.” Wallace has a vast vocabulary and uses some words that the average person may not know. He describes a short story as didactic instead of just instructional. He uses the word banal instead of just unoriginal and uses the word pervasive instead of just spread throughout. By using words such as these Wallace is building up credibility for himself. He sounds intelligent which is good enough for many people to believe that he is indeed intelligent.

Many times throughout the short story Wallace uses the literary device of asyndeton. He describes people as being slaves to their “uniquely, completely, imperially alone” (xiii) lives in order to show how dreary it truly is being stuck in this default setting. By omitting the word “and” Wallace is exaggerating to get his point across. He describes the automatic way of living adult life for most humans is “boring, frustrating, crowded” (xv) and tells us that our default setting has been “codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables” (xvi). Asyndeton is a way for Wallace to keep the readers’ attention and interest while he expresses how he believes the human race should live. He continually describes people and situations by omitting the word “and” to show how dreary it truly is to live in one’s natural default setting.

Wallace gives his anecdotal description of what the natural default setting looks and feels like. He uses situations that most people can relate to, such as sitting in traffic and being annoyed at all of the large SUV’s or the car that just cut someone off. But then Wallace shows what it would be like to think outside of the default setting and to be truly aware of others when he says “it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV” (xv). Wallace gives us a picture of these situations with these anecdotes and shows a comparison between how they are viewed most of the time and how they should be viewed. He wants the reader to connect with these examples and realize that they too are guilty of being in this default setting.

Being stuck in a default setting is Wallace’s fear for himself and for mankind. He wrote this short story to express this fear in hopes that his readers will wake up and snap out of it. By using different literary techniques Wallace gets his point across and makes the passage memorable. He makes it easy to understand the theme and his message with his writing style. All of us should take a step back sometimes and evaluate whether we are in our default setting or our aware setting.
