...The “commencement speech” is a genre of writing that does not like to color outside of the lines. In them, you will hear platitudes such as “this is the beginning of the rest of your life” and “go change the world” that never fail to make the audience roll their eyes. In the vast sea of mediocre commencement speeches, only a few stray from the typical commencement speech formula and are considered exceptional. One of these notable commencement speeches is “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace. In his 2005 commencement speech to Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace’s makes a complete one-eighty from the typical commencement speech; discussing complex topics that were all too vital to the baby-faced, liberal arts graduates. He tackled the...
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...The speech, Kenyon Commencement Speech, by David Foster Wallace was delivered to the graduating class of 2005 at Kenyon College. Wallace talks about how important it is to have a degree that is more than “just a material payoff”. He tells the students that in order to be more successful, they must know how to think correctly. Wallace uses a story of two fish in which a young fish asks an older fish about the water. The older fish does not understand what the younger fish is talking about. He uses this story to show that often the most obvious things in life are often the hardest to see. Wallace tells students that in order for them to receive a full education they must first learn how to think. “[Learning how to think] means being conscious...
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...a pluralistic society”. In two separate readings, “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace, and in “Like Lily Like Wilson” by Taylor Mali, both have that same one core value in mind- empowerment. Mali and Wallace both speak of knowledge and the impact it has within ourselves; how learning to think and speak with conviction gives hope for a greater society. At the 2005 commencement ceremony for the graduating class of Kenyon University, David Foster Wallace spoke to the graduates on the impact of thinking. Fundamentally, human beings have a self-centeredness core, and the inner most part of everyone believes the universe solely revolves around themselves. It’s known this is not really true, but it is in our hard core wiring to believe so. It is in our wiring to believe things are happening to us, that we are victims or the product of some occurrence. In psychology, Sigmund Freud would relate this to our Id, the pleasure principle that is believed to be ingrained in us from birth. These thoughts happen so quickly; they come without much thought or question in to them. David Foster Wallace addresses the class, however, to think about these immediate thoughts, and challenge them. In a great example given by Wallace, he tells the graduates of the daily routine many know of grocery shopping. It is a habitual practice that people seem to find an automatic annoyance. Just on the drive to the grocery store, Wallace describes thoughts alike to many people when they drive themselves- “I...
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...In 2005, David Foster Wallace, an instructor of English and writing as well as a novelist, gave a commencement speech to the graduating students of Kenyon College dubbed “This is Water.” In 2009, a year after Wallace’s suicide, Little, Brown, and Company published a book adaptation of the speech under the guise “This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.” At first glance one would think that the book would just be a direct transcription of the speech itself in order to reach a wider audience. However, at closer look, it is clear that the book version has multiple instances of alteration. These alterations are caused by both the publisher itself along with the very change of the medium. Throughout the book version of “This is...
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...The speech “This is Water” was given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College as a commencement speech for the class of 2005. This short summary will discuss the rhetoric Wallace introduces in his speech and whether or not it is successful. Although the traditional rhetoric style of commencements speeches is optimistic in their nature and hopeful in their message, Wallace explores the harsh and mundane realities of everyday life through symbolic narratives and metaphoric stories about fishes, suicide and your daily grocery store run. Wallace´s tendency to use narratives to illustrate his message builds up his pathos and credibility as a “wise old man”, which he contradicts with a laid back and informal language to encourage the younger audience...
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...The Way of Life The 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address was given by David Foster Wallace, a commencement speaker and a graduating student. DFW states stories that would happen realistically in anyone's lifetime due to the choices of one another. He points out certain flaws that each person has done but didn't realize it. He also explains the rules of patience, everyone has done it and repeats it; your actions influence another's mindset similar to yours and inflicts it on another individual who's innocent of his/her flaws. Although, people bring much negativity in the air, there is still room for positivity and that’s the drive of what keeps people going in life. In the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address by David Foster Wallace, he preaches about the blockades that may be upon the path to your success after graduate school. DFW elaborates realistic conflicts throughout adulthood that brings about a whole other situation to achieve. For instance, "They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing" (Wallace 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address). DFW demonstrates that one action would lead to another, it may be positive or negative, but that's how the way life goes. As flaws fade, don't look back and keep pushing forward. DFW states, "To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties." He...
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...“This is Water” Close Reading Analysis: The Fluidity of Life “This is Water,” written by David Foster Wallace, is a commencement address he gave to a graduating college class in 2005. In this text, Wallace uses water as a symbol for life. As a result of water referring to life, the theme of “This is Water” is the fluidity of life. He shows this to his audience through short stories within his speech. Wallace begins his address with a story about fish. It is mainly about three fish, two young and one old. The two younger ones do not realize they are swimming in water when the older fish asks them “how’s the water” (Wallace X)? They do not know they are submerged in water because they are young and inexperienced: they have not practiced everything...
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...In his 2005 commencement address entitled “This is Water”, author and speaker David Foster Wallace emphasizes the importance of rethinking the most obvious realities as well as practicing a less self-absorbed awareness. Wallace begins his speech with a parable about a fish asking “What the hell is water?” Going on to explain how blind certainty can be damaging, Wallace affirms his point that getting lost inside one’s own head is nowhere near as rewarding and educational as paying attention to what is going on outside of the mind. Wallace further accentuates this idea by commenting on the frustration and annoyance of a typical trip to a grocery store. Wallace then advises his listeners to choose to look differently at an unpleasant situation,...
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...Freedom of education prevents people from being enslaved to ignorance. Education gives people a sense of freedom, and it also gives them the option of “deciding what has meaning and what doesn’t” in their life. In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, The Water, he argues that education should teach us how to be well adjusted, deciding on how to think and what to pay attention to instead of going to our default setting of negativity. David Foster Wallace is right because he thinks that real education is learning to be well adjusted. Freedom of education teaches us how to decide what has and what does not have meaning in our lives, it should teach us how to think not what to think, it should be able to help us develop our critical and...
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...university, the best advice is given in preparation for adulthood. Mary Schmich’s ‘Wear Sunscreen’ (1997) and David Foster Wallace’s ‘This is Water’ (2009) are both unconventional commencement speeches which as a result have caused these speeches to gain great popularity. Despite these similarities, they both have different ways of presenting their non-traditional advice. Schmich conveys multiple points of life advice in a very concise way, whereas Wallace focus’ on the importance of the paying attention and learning how to think. This comparison of ‘Wear Sunscreen’ and ‘This is Water’, shows that audiences can have very positive reactions by bending a speech...
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...In the speech “Kenyon Commencement Speech” given by David Foster Wallace, he addresses an idea that education is not about teaching people how to think but about how to actually control our “default settings” in order to raise our awareness of everything in adult’s life. According to Wallace, same experience makes different people think differently; by not using the automatically default settings enables us to see more possibilities and truth, which requires will and efforts. By giving out two short suggestive stories, Wallace tries to express the opinion of hoping us to raise the level of daily awareness and to think properly and differently. In the first story, the two young fish don’t even know what water is when asked “How’s the water” by the old fish. Wallace is saying that don’t be like the two young fish who ignore the surroundings, which is a foreshadowing in his later speech about the “natural default settings”. If we just use our default settings to think in our daily life, we cannot even aware the simple realities and truth around us. I think he’s right, even though he says he’s not the “wise old fish”. And then, the second story is a conversation between a religious person and an atheist. After surviving in a terrible blizzard, the atheist still doesn’t believe in the existence of God. Because he prayed to God, it turned out to be two Eskimos who helped him. If the religious person were in the same situation, he would definitely...
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...In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, This Is Water, argues that a person has the choice to think critically and should exercise that every day. With the help of intensive and obvious analogies he is able to connect with the audience to a whole another level. He establishes that he is not a wiser person, and that even though he has authority he won’t just tell them what to do. So he starts of by stating his flaws to appeal to others that he is also human and that the purpose of higher education was to teach you how to think. Foster uses logical and emotional appeals to discuss the importance of critical thinking. Wallace believes that we are so close minded that all our attention and thinking is constantly about us instead of others....
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...by others. That is why Jamie had been skipping school recently. With many bad influence from people and media, incidents like these tend to occur very often. For instance, how people get bad influence from the Internet. Nowadays, with modern technologies, we can communicate with other people effortlessly even to the people who are strangers to us. This is a very powerful threat to families with young children because they are very vulnerable to these kind of things. Young children tend to blindly follow whatever they think is right to them and this will increase the number of child delinquency. That’s why people mainly young children need good role models to provide them with a good example. For instance, David Foster Wallace mentioned in his 2005 Kenyon Commencement Speech, “That is freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think” (59). From this statement, I believe that the real value of education is to learn how to think, and this can be done by choosing the right role model. According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, role model is defined as a person that you admire and try to copy. It does not mention about whether the person being alive or not, so this means that we can either choose role models from...
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...David Foster Wallace, the author of the commencement speech for the graduating students of Kenyon College in 2005, entertained the audience and kept them intrigued throughout the entire speech by using grim extremes, opposites, telling stories that the audience could relate too, and using his phrase “Capital-T Truth”. Wallace's point was to not live life with a “blind certainty, a close mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up”, because that is not living, that is being a robot who follows commands programmed into its’ hard drive. In the middle of his speech, Wallace ends up talking about suicide, specifically shooting one’s self in the head. The audience was sure to perk back up again if they had started to nod off. Suicide is a very grim subject, and people become interested when the word comes up. Wallace talks about how adults that commit suicide have already been dead long before the bullet pierces the skull. Their brain has started to run on auto-pilot and they don't actually think for themselves. Unfortunately, on September 12, 2008, Wallace has had the personal experience of suicide as well. His wife had come home and found that her husband had hung himself. Perhaps he personally knew what the suicides were thinking before killing themselves. On a brighter note, Wallace does a great job of telling stories in his speech; stories that the audience could relate too. By audience, I do not just...
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...more learning from their teachers than at home. Although most may think of teachers as purely academic entities, David foster Wallace thinks they are much more. During his commencement speech to Kenyon college he puts forth the idea that the purpose of our education is to open our minds to the world around us; allowing us to see the world as more than just black and white. Firstly, Wallace expresses the reality of who we really are as people through his story of the two men in the bar. While this story on the obvious side shows us how self centered the human race is, it also contradictingly shows the ignorance of not only our own feeling thought and views but others as well. According to Wallace we embrace this "blind certainty" because we are stuck in our minds to be aware of our surroundings (2). One can agree that it is hard to ignore beliefs and ideas that have been strung along for years, literally making one who they are. Wallace's idea on the topic of the bottled up mind is that it is a skill to look past...
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