 In the speech, “This is Water”, David Foster Wallace touches upon the subject of adult life and how overwhelmingly long and boring it will seem, but he later says that it is only those with a liberal arts degree that can survive this boring life ahead of them because they’re able to look at situations with another perspective. As an outsider to Wallace’s life, one can look at Wallace and say how he thought of life as worthless, therefore his speech is just touching upon his own beliefs of life in general, but he holds a strong connection with an idea that becomes clear within the fourth paragraph. The issue is he almost betrays his idea by giving this speech to the audience. By analyzing this text for key concepts and repetition of words, one would be able to see how much Wallace focuses on making a point about perception and how different it can be for a wide variety of people, but in a way he is being hypocritical because he is pushing his views on perception of life on the audience.

The main concept of his speech begins to show through when he first introduces the story of the religious man and the atheist and the story goes on to talk about how the atheist prayed to God in a terrible blizzard he was stuck in and all that happened was a group of eskimos came to help him out of the blizzard, but the religious man was looking at him astounded that he still believed that that group of eskimos weren’t sent by God (Wallace). So basically, the moral of that story was that the two men had two different perceptions of the same event. This is the point that Wallace was trying to make with this speech, but the point of that small story also suggests how Wallace is hypocritical to talk so much about differing perceptions when he is telling the graduating students that it is their duty to be open-minded to perception, while he is not being open-minded about their perception of his speech.

Later in the speech when he is actually going over a string of events that occur in day to day life as an adult. He blatantly starts to suggest different scenarios that some of these people may be going through on the market line. For example, “Or that Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way” (Wallace), shows that he is looking at different ways that he can perceive such an everyday occurrence. This shows that even he who thinks of adult life as worthless is able to or can perceive such various solutions to issues that an everyday person would be aggravated by, but again that’s about him and he is still technically pushing the graduating class to consider life as he does or at least should.

In the third to last paragraph, he brings up perception again because he discusses how all people worship something. In the sentence“The only choice we get is what to worship”(Wallace), he brings up an interesting point about choice and he’s right to suggest that choice is what leads people to perceive what they would like to perceive, not just in religious context but also in everyday life. He worships this idea that he is hinting at throughout his speech, which is not exactly open-mindedness of what other people may worship though because this speech can have an impact on the perceptions of the intended audience of the speech.

We see him being hypocritical again with his repetition of words, like in his seventh paragraph when he starts using “YOU” or “YOUR” about five times through one sentence. The sentence “The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor” (Wallace), suggests that he is again persuading the audience that society default’s to self-centeredness as a sort of perception of one’s possessions both physically and figuratively, but someone in the audience may not think with the self-centeredness that he begins talking about.

He uses repetition of words again when he starts talking about the trip to the food market, instead this time he uses the word “MY” instead of “YOU”/” YOUR”. In the sentence, “About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way” (Wallace), suggests that he is trying to say that people worship themselves and that the audience should really try to reconsider other people’s perception of the same event. The issue is he experiences all of the things that he is trying to tell the audience they should really take into consideration, but if someone is telling someone to do something that the first person really doesn’t do themselves, it makes them a hypocrite.

Through analyzing the repetition of words and the key concept of this speech one is able to see how much Wallace focuses on perception but doesn’t show his own tolerance of perception by forcing his ideas on the audience. Wallace’s overall message of perception and how different it can be for different people, almost makes his argument bias, since he is telling the audience that they must express tolerance to different perceptions. If the audience were to actually look at the main concept of this speech, would they have actually listened to Wallace or taken him as a hypocrite because of his slight betrayal of his own words, no one will know.
