Imagine living the life on autopilot, all the time. Life would get boring, you would feel like there is no point of life, you would feel imprisoned in your own body. The lack of awareness makes you a prisoner to your body day in and day out. This is the main argument David Foster Wallace is portraying in his commencement speech “This is Water”.  He also has the valid argument that if people don't make choices on how to think, they will live accustomed to a self-centered view of the world and live dull lives. Wallace uses different rhetorical devices to aid in getting his point across in his speech. The use of repetition the appeals to ethos and logos, and the changing point of views are some of the devices he effectively uses throughout his commencement speech. 

Wallace’s choice to vary the use of first and second point of view has many benefits. He has the ability to get the audience involved in his thinking process; which enables the audience to be able to feel as if they are apart of the experiences.  The audience gets absorbed into his speech from continuous change in the point of view. He is successful in this technique because rather than giving an argument with facts that support it, he is giving real life examples.  Therefore, the audience is staying focused on his speech and is actually comprehending what he is saying, instead of losing interest and focusing on something else. As a result, he is able to close the gap between the speaker and the audience with this handy technique. By giving a speech that is exciting and keeps the audiences attention , they will realize that if their life is not boring, they will stay in tune with it rather than basically living on autopilot, relating to one of his main arguments.

Wallace uses appeals to ethos to his advantage in his commencement speech. By using this technique he gets the audience to relate to him and he establishes his credibility.  Wallace nonchalantly tell this audience, “if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be.I am not the wise old fish.”(Wallace X)  The audience is put at ease because they know he is not pretending to be somebody he is not, so they can then trust him and they know he can relate to the things they have been through.  Another example of how Wallace appeals to ethos is when he says “If you're like me as a student you've never liked hearing this, and you then to feel a bit instead by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think”(Wallace XI).  By relating to the audience on a student level, they are trusting him and believe what he is saying is true, therefore taking the advice he has to give them. Wallace is outdoing the the ordinary commencement speech format by relating to his audience.

 The appeal to logos is used throughout his speech. The most prominent appeal was with the two main stories. One story is about an atheist who is stranded in the arctic, he asks god for help, two eskimos just happen to walk by and help him back.  The atheist still does not believe in God, even after it appears he is real. Since “a couple of eskimos”(xi) coincidentally walked by while he was stranded in the middle of no where.  The other story was about a fish who questioned “What the hell is water?”(Wallace X) The audience logically assumes the atheist and the fish have faults within their reasoning.  They think the atheist should believe there is a God and they find it ironic the fish does not know what water is. The characters are both close minded and the audience picks up on the close-mindedness, they see the affects of it too. These stories support Wallace’s argument that being close-minded will lead to the lack of awareness, which will lead to imprisonment of your body. 

Wallace uses the repetition of a phase that is similar to ‘death’ throughout his speech. Death in his speech is from the imprisonment  of your body from living a life without making choices, without thinking, and the lack of awareness. With this ‘lack of awareness’ you’ll most certainly experience death, its inevitable when you're a prisoner to your own body, you’re already dead because you're not living life aware. As he states in his speech, "It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head... suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger”(Wallace XIII). You're already dead from living a life without awareness so it wouldn't be a bad thing to go ahead and 

kill your self.  If you continue to go “through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your own head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely imperially alone day in and day out”(Wallace XII), you wont live life the way it is suppose to be lived. You will live a dull life, one that leads to death before you're actually dead.

David Foster Wallace believes a life that is lived without awareness turns you into a prisoner of your own body. Also, without thinking your way through life and making your own choices, you will view the world in a self-centered way. Wallace successfully uses repetition pertaining to death, constant changes in the point of view, and appealing to ethos and logos to help the audience interpret the message he is trying to convey in his commencement speech. 
