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David Foster Wallace This Is Water Analysis

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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 …show more content…
These new inclusions not only differ to Wallace’s views in the speech, but are contradictory to them on various levels. One of the most egregious examples is after Wallace talks about the awareness of one’s self along with different ways of thinking, Little, Brown and Company add “It is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head” (Little Brown 130). Through adding this, Little, Brown and Company keeps the pain and frustration of day to day life the center of attention to the reader. By shifting the focus on the reader and their lives, it keeps them the focal point of the topic and enforces humanities natural perspective of being the center of the universe. This self-centeredness is what Wallace wants people to avoid doing. Wallace wanted people to think and see through a lens separate from their self in order to see things from a different perspective. However, due to Little, Brown Company’s addition, that notion has been offset and

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