You are awoken by a sound so familiar and so jarring, you are sure it will haunt you until your deathbed. It is 6:00 AM and the daily routine of crawling out of bed, getting ready, and then driving to work has just begun. After battling the eternal hour long commute, you make it to work where it is assumed your day is just beginning. On your way home, the traffic is just as bad, and when you finally arrive home, you are so exhausted you want to get to bed early so you can be well rested for tomorrow. Life continues these familiar steps day after day, year after year, with little change. According to David Foster Wallace, these are the inevitable facts of life for the graduating class of Kenyon College. However, while it might be too late for them to change their middle class career choices, it is not too early for them to start avoiding a negative attitude toward the world and to those around them. Through strong pathos, ethos, logos, dark figurative language, and dry humor, Wallace crafts the argument that an education is not enough to be happy; one has to consciously make decisions about how to view the day-to-day events of life in order to feel happier and more fulfilled.

Deciding “what has meaning and what doesn't” might seem simple, but it is no help to graduates if they simply forget in a couple weeks, months, or even years the message Wallace is trying to convey (Wallace 8). Wallace wants to alter how people view daily life, and his speech makes clear that he wants the audience to take his message to heart. Repetition of key phrases such as “the capital-T truth” and “this is water” helps to remind the audience of the hard cut aspects of the not so black and white subject of happiness and fulfillment (Wallace 8-9). The speech opens with the story of two fish asking the question “what is water” which is a metaphor for how many people fail to recognize major aspects of the world around them, simply because they are always there. The audience is reminded “this is water, this is water” twice in order to emphasize the importance of thinking about the obvious facts of life around you (Wallace 9). Wallace effectively uses repetition and analogies throughout his speech to make many big picture ideas easier to remember and understand.

David Foster Wallace is an expert in appealing to the audience’s emotions using pathos. His book Infinite Jest has been named one of the greatest contemporary works of the 20th Century by Time Magazine for how it relates with the audiences’ underlying fears and insecurities (Grossman 42). In “This is Water,” Wallace achieves the same goals by using dark and death related imagery that takes the audience, specifically the euphoric graduating class, by surprise and forces them to come to terms with the more bleak outlook that David Foster Wallace presents them. He asserts that not having an understanding of the “banal platitudes [of adult existence] can have life-or-death importance” (Wallace 1). First and foremost, this illustrates that Wallace considers the dull commonplaces of adulthood more than just an annoyance; they can bring a person to the “day-to-day trenches of adult existence”: a battle for life. It is continued when Wallace speaks of the terrible truth behind the “old cliché [of]… ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’” The dichotomy between the mind being control and not in control is one Wallace feels in life. People’s daily life routines both give them purpose and take it away. “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger” (Wallace 4). This remark about suicide stands out stylistically, tonally, and in subject from the rest of paper, which is dark, but much more tame. Suicide and its imagery is so blatant and appalling to the audience that they are left willing to attempt change rather than to temp this fate. Wallace’s point is too scare the audience away from letting the monotony of daily life affect them in the negative way he feels it has affected himself.

Why should an audience hark Wallace’s advice- what gives him sway with the audience? Wallace is a well-received author, however he is not giving constructive criticism on writing, he is giving life advice on how to avoid daily dissatisfaction. By using Ethos, he builds his character and his reputation as a struggling and unhappy adult, but one that knows what to do in order to change. Wallace tells a story that is mundane, but relatable to the audience. “But then you remember there's no food at home - you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job - and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very 3 bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded […] the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register” (Wallace 5). This over-embellished story of the weekly grocery store trip shows the inner-workings of society, and how the dehumanizing of those around leads to pent up emotions where you have to "grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by" (Wallace 5). The audience can relate because most have been in a similar situation and wonder how they can make it better.

Furthermore, in the same example, the syntax Wallace uses is incredibly long sentences that cause the story to feel slow and drawn out. In the entire seventh paragraph, there are only three sentences, yet 345 words (Wallace 6). These long winded examples continue on and off, altering his tone and function between foreboding, playful, and serious tones. Wallace changes this type of syntax when later in the text, he uses short thoughts connected and interrupted with dashes. “And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God […] you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out” (Wallace 8).  The idea that one has a great amount of control over what holds power and truth in life is broken down into examples and logical statements that the author wants the audience to quickly understand and relate with. ‘How’ one thinks has just as much of an impact as ‘what’ one thinks and similarly, ‘how’ Wallace shows this in his speech is just as important as ‘what’ he is showing.

Wallace creates a speech that does more than inform the audience they are going to face a difficult road ahead of them, but that they can improve their quality of life. Wallace knows this will not be easy, and in fact struggles with it himself. The “default-setting” people tend to is a dark, sad, and lonely way of life; but by viewing others as people, and understudying their needs are just as important, or more important than oneself, the small, bothersome moments in life become more human and tolerable. In the grocery store when a mother “screamed at her little child in the checkout line — maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer […]” (Wallace 7). Humans are easier to live with than the mistakes they make, and remembering this is the best way to feel happier and more satisfied in life.
