David Foster Wallace speech at Kenyon Collage in 2005 delivered a different type of commencement address. He talks about how it is human nature for people to automatically think about themselves first (Wallace XIII). We do not think about what the person next to us is going through we just think about our situation and what we need (Wallace XIII). This has a lot of truth to it. When we are in line somewhere, by the time we get to the cashier we are grumpy. We do not think about how long their day might have been. Instead we think, they are not very good at their job or can’t they afford to have more checkout lines open? We fail to think maybe someone called in sick, maybe this is the cashier’s first day, or maybe some unexpected problem occurred. Being educated is not just knowing information from your text book in your university degree, it is about how to learn to put your self in someone else’s shoes. By doing this we will eliminate a lot of annoyance in every day life and prevent many problems. Again, David Foster Wallace makes the point that being educated is so much more than just knowing things; it is building a person’s character.

David Foster Wallace mentioned some sentence to educate people and to show them another way to think about things. One of these sentence is, “ there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of” (Wallace XII). He meant here that everything we have done like adventuring, studying, or even playing we were always the center of that things. We were the director of every thing going on in that experience. For example: if you decided to study a certain subject at the university you are the only one who can fail or pass that course because you are the only one in charge of that, so blaming anything like the professor or the time is not right because you can fix everything yourself. Also he mentioned another sentence which is “learning how to think really means how to exercise some control over how and what you think”(Wallace XIII).  It’s mean that adults should learn how to focus on one thing specifically and try not to be hypnotized by the constant monologue in their heads. However, hypnotizing by the constant monologue in your head happens frequently for people, they should exercise how to not be hypnotized and focus on what they need.

The author also mentioned some repeated words like the word death. He repeated this word in more than one place in different meanings. For instance the author mentioned the word death on paragraph fourteen by saying “the absolute voice of death”(Wallace XIV). Here death was meant in a metaphorical way. The author was talking here about long cashier lines on supermarkets and how people can be grumpy or sometimes turn crazy from the cashiers without knowing the reason beyond that, so the author wants us to assume that the cashier has some issues that make him/her tired or not in the working mood. However, after they finish your checkout they told you ‘Have a nice day” with that deadly voice that means they are tired, which proves that they went through a rough day. And that what we need to know is that not everybody has like our situation or better, some people have a terrible situation, so they are not able serve you in the perfect way.

Another mention for the word death was in paragraph eleven. The author mentioned the word in two different ways, the first was by saying “adults who commit suicide with firearms”(Wallace XIII). He meant the physical death this time. And the second time was by saying “ the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.” (Wallace XIII). Here he meant the death in metaphorical way, so in this example the person died twice, the first was metaphorical when he decided to kill himself and the second was when he physically killed himself. 

Moreover, there is a point attracted us when the author talked about worshipping. He said that people always worship something like God or Allah but there are people who worship something in their life like money or beauty. These people will never have enough of what they worship. For instance, if someone worships money, he/she will collect money and will never feel that he has enough money even if he/she becomes a millionaire. Also if some one worship beauty, he/she will always see him/her self as ugly (Wallace XVI). What you worship will affect the way you think, and it may turn your life to happiness but also it may turn you life to a hell.

All in all, in this speech David Foster Wallace wants the reader to rethink about the way they see other people and don’t judge a book by it’s cover. He wants us to be well-adjusted, so we can be successfully altered to see people by putting ourselves in their shoes. David’s speech was an influential speech that allows us to see people from their perspective, and also allows us to respect people’s conditions even if we don’t know what they are. I think the speech is great because the meaning that it delivers for the reader and it also gives people a sense of awareness.
