In the speech, “This Is Water”, by David Foster Wallace, he is addressing the Kenyon College graduating class of 2005. His speech is intended to tell the graduates why their liberal arts degrees have more human value than actual money value that will be made from a job in their field. While Foster tried to make the speech seem inspirational and have a positive impact on the graduates, I interpreted the speech in a negative manner. I believe Wallace is trying to say that the world is in a very bad place, bad things are always going to happen, and life will always be miserable. He gives hope to the students by telling them that if they change their thoughts, then the whole world can change and become more simple and peaceful. However, Wallace appears to believe that he is giving false hope to young adults who have never truly experienced the real world.  He does not seem to believe in his own words, and he comes off as having a consistently negative view of people, the world, and life itself.

Wallace starts his negativity early on in his speech. In the beginning of the second paragraph, he states, “This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories” (X). And again in the third paragraph, Wallace says, “So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech drama” (XI). While these phrases may not appear as negative to the audience at the time, they play an important role in a point Wallace brings up later. Wallace is essentially saying that he is just following the typical rules for a commencement speech instead of setting his own path and being original. Later, when talking about everyday life and little things that constantly happen to aggravate people, Wallace says, “But it hasn’t yet been a part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year” (XIV). In this quote, Wallace is telling the audience life is like being stuck in the same routine every day with no escape. However, Wallace tells them it is their choice of whether or not to think of the routine as a positive or negative manner and they should attempt to think on the bright side. I find this contradicting though because Wallace makes his speech appear as if it is in the same routine as any other speech that is given. This shows that Wallace has a life much like his speech which is being stuck in a never ending routine. Everything Wallace is telling the audience are ideas that do not even work for him, so in a sense he knows that if they change their thinking about life, it will not work. He is giving the graduates false hope that a change of thought will change their lives.

Throughout his speech, Wallace repeatedly emphasizes the idea of choice. He believes people always have the choice of how to think of certain situations, and the way they think of these situations will have an impact on how they look at life. For example, Wallace talks about a crazy grocery store checkout line at the end of the day that is extremely long and infuriating, and the lady working seems miserable. He then states that most people would just be aggravated and pissed off, or they have the option to think, “I can choose myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am” (XV). However, very few people actually think like this. He also states another example about getting cut off by a large SUV on the highway and how people can choose to think that the person is actually in an emergency and had a more important place to be. In reality people do not think like this, but instead think themselves are more important. Wallace says, “Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting” (XIV). This is the default setting for everyone; that they are the center of their own universe, and they are more important than other people. So while Wallace told the graduates that if they change their thinking, it can rub off on others, and everyone will put others first all the time, he knows that this is not true. Wallace understands the default setting of people’s thoughts but gives the graduates false hope that the way the graduates think can make the world a more peaceful place and make the everyday routine of life a little better.

I interpreted the speech as having a negative connotation because of the negative images he paints in the audience’s minds. One of the first stories he tells is between two men arguing over whether God is real or not. However, instead of having a simple conversation about it, Wallace depicts the scene as being a rather intense argument, and both of the men being under the influence of alcohol. Often times, alcohol is related to fights and being ignorant. He shows that people will be ignorant towards others beliefs and not accepting of ideas presented by others, when often times this is not true. However, Wallace portrays the worst way in which this situation could have been settled; no understanding of other people’s views. He also portrays the image of death within his speech. When he is talking about a seeing a stressed lady yell at her kids in line, he suggests that, “Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer” (XV). Wallace again brings up the worst case scenario. In this instance the scenario is more severe, and is death. Instead of saying that the lady could be stressed from something easier, he picks cancer and death. Wallace is a man with a lot of life experience, but always uses the worst case scenario in his stories. He is constantly putting negative images into the heads of the graduates because that what he knows life is about. It is a negative world and bad things will always happen.

The speech by Wallace is interpreted a lot different than how it is originally told. He attempted to give positive life advice to many young adults who are about to head off into life. However, after looking deeper into the essay, Wallace gave them life advice of negativity. Wallace really just told everyone how awful life will be after college and that there is almost no escape to the harsh reality of death, negativity, and being stuck in the same routine forever. When trying to say how much a difference the graduates can make, he told them how impossible it really is.
