In David Foster Wallace’s commencement address “This is Water,” the author emphasizes the importance of living one’s life to the fullest before their death. Foster’s speech was raw, powerful, and real. Since death is often a topic that is difficult for many people to comprehend and talk about, Foster uses a serious and mature tone throughout the passage to impact the listeners.  The author also uses death to inform the graduates about how adulthood can be depressing when people fall into a boring and continuous daily routine.  Through analyzing Wallace’s address, the word “death” readers can understand how death is used to dramatize the negative aspects that come along with life, such as its impact on the future and how we can either live a unique life or fall into a tedious routine.

The first instance where Foster brings up death, he is using it to give advice for the future.  The listeners heard this when Foster said, “Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance…”(XI). Here Foster was talking about how the life of an adult can lack originality.  When choosing what to do with life, Foster thinks that life will always find a way to propel adults into a routine of eating, working, and sleeping that can be considered boring, but with that every adult is given his or her own ability to make choices; an adult can either fall into their routine and choose to accept it, or they can choose to make their life a marathon full of twists, turns, and unexpected surprises.  The quote negatively interprets life because it tells the children that the future will be boring and that it will have no originally on a day-to-day basis if we allow it to be. This quote is also significant because it gives a glimpse into what that rest of his commencement speech is about which is routine of adulthood. He uses the word death in this paragraph as a way to set a negative and depressing tone.  Foster tells the listeners that every choice after graduation is in their hands and those choices that could either lead them on an exciting journey to the top or a boring steady-state occupation and routine.

Foster also used the term “death” to express negative feelings of the future. He believed that it is often an adult can be put onto a default setting. This is evident when he said, “...how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable, adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely....” (XIII). This instance of death contradicts the first because it says how no matter what happens, an adult is going to fall into the natural default setting and end up living a boring life.  Foster does not use death as a symbol of dying, but more as a symbol of the disappearing into mankind. He, in turn, is describing life here almost as the opportunity to choose to live a boring, monotonous life that equivalates to death.  

The third time Foster mentioned the word death was to talk about the unknown struggles that people may have to face in their lives.  The reader sees this when Foster speaks about how people never know what other people are going through in their lives. This is shown when Foster said, “Maybe she has been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who is dying of bone cancer” (XIV). Foster uses death in a depressing way at this part of the speech to tell his audience to never judge people because their life can be worse than yours.  In this part of the text, death is symbolizing the literal unknown struggles that people hope doesn’t enter their life. He refrains from using any form of metaphoric comparison or hyperbole to purely show the unavoidable and natural grasps of death.  

The last occasion that Foster uses death it is completely different from the rest of his points. Death is used in a sense to empower people to prove that even if life is hard people will overcome many things before they leave this earth. This is evident when Foster said, “Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you”(XVI). This quote is significant because it is one of the few times that death s used in a positive way. Instead of using it as people being boring in their routine life Foster uses it to tell people to live their life and make mistakes because one mistake will not be the end of everything. 

The idea of Foster's speech is to inform the students about the heavy burdens that come along with life.  By using “death” he was able to set a serious emotional state to warn people about the repetitive and boring life of an adult.  Death is used often used in the speech in order to set the tone.  The feeling of this speech is negative; instead of sending the children away on a motivating term he warns them that adulthood is not a fun thing when caught in the wrong cycle. At the end of the speech Wallace begins to talk about the truth behind adulthood.  He speaks about how the life before death is so important. If people spend their whole life being self-absorbed they will not be able to see what life is really about. Wallace intends for the audience to live their lives happily and to do what they want to do wholeheartedly.

In the commencement speech “This is Water”, death is a symbol of the different ways adulthood can affect someone. It represents a choice that people must make and involuntary struggles that come along with being an adult.  Foster sees death not as the physical body shutting down, but as a person getting lost in the crazy world of people unconsciously doing the same thing every day. Wallace’s use of the word “death” enables readers to understand how death is used to amplify struggles of life and its way of causing adults to fall into a boring routine.
