After graduating college most individuals are expecting to get out into the new world with a new set of responsibilities and freedom; most expect to be in a fairytale world where life is perfect.  All of this was true for the Kenyon college graduates in 2005, when David Foster Wallace gave his famous commencement speech to the graduating class that gave them a look into what’s to come in being an adult.  Wallace uses several tactics in his speech including repetition, syntax, and hyperbolic parables.

 In David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water,” Wallace uses words like “dead, death” and other morbid terms relating to death.  Wallace uses the word death when describing his “simple” trip to the grocery store after a long day’s work by saying, “Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to ‘Have a nice day’ in a voice that is the absolute voice of death”(Wallace XIV.) Wallace uses this to portray how if people don’t take our brains off of the selfish autopilot that is so commonly characterized as human nature, then people will go insane from simple everyday interactions with people.  Wallace uses this quote to show how the mind is with a subtle “absolute voice of death” which shows how selfish the mind is.  Wallace is trying to convey that the non-conscious human mind is selfish, and that if people do not take the time to think of others people will walk through life tossing away precious and uncommon opportunities that are ever-so common in today’s world.  Even in this small supermarket background that is painted by Wallace, he portrays a feeling of death and despair with his razor sharp word choice. He also shows that growing up and getting into to the real world isn’t always what it is hyped up to be.  In regards to this it helps the readers grow more in-depth with the way Wallace wants us to feel when he gives us this speech.  With regards to how Wallace interacts with the cashier it shows Wallace’s annoyance with the cashier is seeping into his day and this voice of the cashier reeks of death because it is draining to just be surrounded by people all day who seem to be in a dead-cow like state(Wallace.)  It’s in these day to day interactions with people where he shows a level of bereavement that comes with the forced small-talk and having to feign any sort of excitement to talk to a person in his day to day life.  Contained within is the dark humor and morbid-reality that shows Wallace is trying to portray the morbid hilarity that is caused by living everyday life as though people are on auto-pilot. He accomplishes this so effortlessly in this speech with his concise word choice.    Wallace uses the word dead when he is describing the people in the checkout line in front of him and how it isn’t fair that all these people are in his way.  He states, “And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line.” (Wallace XIV)  Foster is explaining how it is unfair that he is stuck behind these “cow-like” people in front of him and uses the words “dead-eyed” which has an eerie contrast between funny and seemingly gruesome. His entire speech seems to be seeping with these types of critical brain gushers. Wallace being in the checkout line at the grocery store says how the people around him are “sheople”, that they act in a way that shows no life inside them when in their day to day experiences.  Everyone standing in line doing the same thing without actually interacting and even some just looking like husks of their actual being.   After Wallace deploys his first three examples of death, he starts to talk about religion, before wrapping his speech up by going back to his recurring word choice of death in his final paragraph where Wallace says, “The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.\” (Wallace XVII.) Wallace uses this example to furthermore wrap up his essay by helping the reader understand the point he is trying to get across by saying that if people let our minds run on autopilot, people will simply cease to be a productive part of society. But, even if rarely people remind ourselves that people are real, and that “This is Water,” then people will go through life much happier rather than if people live life than those who are always on autopilot but people need to understand how to live life and enjoy the little things.  

Wallace uses syntax throughout his work, Wallace tells, “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.” (Wallace XIII)  With this Wallace uses adept strategies in his sentence structure and punctuation to convey his point.  Wallace uses a colon to make the reader think about what he is about to say before actually saying, forcing us to take our minds off autopilot. Wallace also uses juxtaposition when he puts the short “They shoot the terrible master” sentence in the middle of two long drawn out sentences, by doing this he creates a separate bubble in the reader’s head thinking about the “terrible master.”   Using the suicide and death in this example is saying “the terrible master” is referring to their minds when they are on autopilot and living their boring lives.  Wallace is extremely conscious of the painting that this quote portrays and most will read over it and think he is talking about nothing and non-sense, but using his sentence structure it shows that “the terrible master” is talking about the mind on autopilot.  The quote as a whole seems like it is just referring to shooting one’s self in the head because it is instant death, but Wallace is talking about the mind and takes it a whole other level deeper of thought.

 Wallace uses juxtaposition again and hyperbole when he talks about the average adult day “By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home.”  Wallace uses his first sentence very carefully because as it is read you realize that much like the average adult day it seems to go on forever, Wallace achieves this feel through 10 commas which suspend the ending of the sentence for ninety words what some authors would consider a good length for a paragraph Wallace uses as a simple setup to a story.  After using his extremely long sentence describing the average adult day that seems to go on forever he provides comedic relief with the juxtaposition of the situations, one describing the long work day where one would just want to go home and be done to having to do one last thing as that how life actually is and how it seems that it is never ending.  Wallace uses his juxtaposition to provide a window into the adult world through his speech to the soon would be adults that are the Kenyon class of 2005.

Wallace deploys uses of syntax, repetition, and hyperbolic parables to aid in his commencement speech to the graduation class of Kenyon College in 2005.  To somewhat shatter but also bring the students the realization that adult life isn’t college anymore and there are pointless little things in life that are annoying but essential to life and that if you go through life stuck on autopilot you will miss out on the good moments that happen in everyday life.
