David Foster Wallace's This Is Water

This is Water, was a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005. Ever since this speech has been given it has become well known. Because of the length, it can be hard to read through the speech while trying to understand the whole idea of it. Wallace fills the speech with stories, examples, and vivid ideas while trying to convince these college graduates how to view life in a positive perspective. While this speech is packed full of ideas he manages to give it in a way outside of the norm for commencement speeches. Yet still gets all the information to the graduates and anyone else who listens to it.

David Foster Wallace’s short story “Good People” uses the themes of division, isolation, and loneliness to suggest how communication can overcomes these psychological problems. These themes, prominent in the story of a young couple struggling with how to react to an unwanted pregnancy, are present in many of Wallace’s stories, and come from his own struggles and literary influences.

In David Foster Wallace’s graduation speech, This Is Water, he uses logical and emotional appeals to discuss the importance of critical thinking. Wallace uses the term “conscious” to signal critical thinkers, while those who do not think critically are referred to as “unconscious.” Wallace’s main argument is that a person has the choice to think critically and should do so every day. Wallace’s analysis of consciousness and unconsciousness focusses too heavily on the logical and emotional appeals and ignores the possible ethical arguments that support the development of conscious societies, such as activism. In doing so, Wallace favours the self-interested members of the audience and alienates those who favour altruism, limiting the

1. David Foster Wallace opens his speech with an anecdote about fish and water. Metaphorically, what does this anecdote represent? What impact does it have when Wallace returns to the line “This is water”again at the end of the speech?

When people are treated unfairly or unjustly, how should they perceive it and how do they generally react to this? In The Color of Water by James McBride, prejudice shapes James and Ruth in many ways, James has different stories than Ruth, due to the fact that he lived in a different time period, which makes his scenario different from Ruth’s. Both faced adversity, and stood up for themselves and defended themselves in many different ways just to make sure that they could survive in society. Ruth had always taught her children to be independent. She comes from an interesting background, she was starving of love and affection as a child. Ruth has experienced a lot of grief in her life due to all of these bad events that occurred. Even growing up, her father had treated her unfairly by taking advantage of her sexually. This was definitely not a right thing to do, Ruth’s father was an abusive man who had a sex addiction. He was found to have an affair with another woman even though Mameh knew about it the entire time. Due to her rough past when practicing Judaism, she decided to practice Catholicism after marrying Andrew Dennis McBride. She felt as if she was a freer person, she gained a personal connection to the religion which was good because it helped for her to get her mind off of things. James is a very confused boy, being black and white. He’s unsure where he fits in when it comes to society. A personal connection that I have to

In The Color of Water by James McBride he faces plenty of obstacles in his life. One that I think was very important during his childhood is in chapter 14 where makes a few bad choices after his stepfather, Hunter Jordan, dies. Since James didn't get to know his biological father, Hunter was the closest he ever came to having one. He makes it clear that his family loved Hunter and when he died they were all devastated but none as much as their mother. It's safe to say she wasn't the same and that can be seen when McBride says "She sent us off to school and tried to maintain her crazy house as usual, ranting about this and that, but the fire was gone" (McBride, 137). I think his mother's behavior no doubt had some effect on the way he acted.

David Foster Wallace in his speech called "What is water" states as a main idea that everyone through their life journey should always be aware of everything and try to find out the right ways out of situations that happens during this journey by using education that the graduates received and use the cleverly. With different stories he explains that the way how we are thinking can influence on our understanding about a given situation everywhere, it can be at home ,work,store and etc. only the education can give them the ability to control their own minds and get advantages from their or others life experiences and use them as a guide through their "average adult days". The author brings a lot of examples from his own life so his message for

In the book, The Color of Water, chapter 22, by James McBride, James meets Aubrey Rubinstein. James finally found for what he was searching for, which was a long search for the Shilsky family. James found out that his grandmother Hudis was buried in a Long Island graveyard. James saw Dee Dee but he did not want to approach her because he knows she had been through so much. James stated that “ I could only imagine how painful that must have been…” (McBride 221). James felt his aunt sorrow and did not want to approach her because he didn’t want to bring more pain into her. While walking through the river, James thought of his grandmother past. James had no more tears and didn’t expect his mother's family to go through this much because his mother

What exactly is a self-narrative or in other words an identity? Could it be described as someone’s life story and their individual uniqueness? A self-narrative is a broad topic that has more meaning just one. In order to get a wide range of knowledge about a self-narrative one has to understand the different self-making narratives. In the stories Memory of Water by Emmi Itaranta, Being Prey by Val Plumwood, Nightmare by Malcolm X, express self-making narratives by stating how their experiences have transformed their self-identities originally. This occurs when External and internal beliefs are altered, turning points in our lives occur, creating a self-narrative full of distinctiveness. All of these stories stated above all show

Most people go around living life believing that they don’t need to be taught how to think because they already know how to. It’s one of those basic things that if you’re human you automatically do. Which is true, everyone is capable of thinking, but they often tend to put themselves as the main focal point before anything else. David Foster Wallace, who’s well known for his novels and creative writing delivered a commencement speech at Kenyon College in the year of 2005, titled “This is Water.” The message that David Foster Wallace was communicating to this graduating class is that humans generally think about themselves in every situation they’re in without giving a second thought to what might really be happening. That people tend to miss what’s real or important because, well, it’s not always that obvious to them. Wallace utilizes appeals to logic, value and emotion to effectively get his message across.

We Live in Water is a book of short stories written by the postmodern American novelist, Jess Walter. Postmodernist fiction is a form of literature that began after World War II, which offered new and interesting ways to look at society and the arts (Hogue). There are a number of stylistic techniques that are often used in postmodern literature, such as parody, pastiche, fragmentation, and playfulness (Fleming). Though pastiche is the most prominent in We live in Water. Pastiche is generally the respectful imitation of a literary work or the style and content of a work, such as themes, concepts, and characters (“Pastiche”). “Pastiche came to prominence when artists realized that the contemporary moment presents little room for originality because everything has been said and done before–leading postmodern artists to ‘pluck existing styles higgledy-piggledy from the reservoir of literary history’” (Matos).Walter’s imitation of other authors and styles in We Live in Water is one of the many aspects that makes this collection of stories an example of postmodern literature. Jess Walter uses pastiche in the stories “Virgo,” “Don’t Eat Cat,” “Thief,” and “The Last Frontier.” Since, pastiche is merely imitating certain parts of other styles, etc, it is not necessary for the author to use every detail in the same way as the original. Therefore, it is important to point out that Walter does indeed break many of the rules of what one would expect these types of stories (i.e.

“What the hell is water?” “This is Water” was originally given as a speech to college students before it was published in essay form. Essayist, David Foster Wallace, in his essay “This is Water”, addresses the importance of awareness and perceptiveness of others. He believes this and the proper education can help you become well-adjusted to the world around you. He adopts a humorous and important tone in order to accomplish his rhetorical purpose.

Water slowly brushes across the carbon fiber side of the shell, and at this point a sense of familiarity emerges. The rhythmic beating of my pulse fills my ears, working to push away the background and bring my awareness to that of the girl in front of me, my coxswain, and my oar– a true marriage of sorts. I make sure to check that the equipment functions by running my fingers over the bolts of my rigger, the straps of my foot stretchers, and finally, as a ritual, tapping my blade against the water three times. Following this, I allow myself only one opportunity to break the wall between my position in the boat and my surroundings– a glance at each girl in the boats next to me– to remind myself to outpull all of them. The tension rapidly increases as the referee announces that “We have alignment”, otherwise a universal signal to all rowers to mind the impending start of the race. The low voice of my coxswain reminds everyone to adjust their seating position in the boat, sit up straight, and have their shoulders back–the

He frantically breathed his third and last wish, “I wish that my son was dead.” Mr. White sobbed. The knocking suddenly stopped. Ms. White had a confused look on her face. She opened the door only to see her son lying down on the porch on his knees. “I love you.” Her son said. He then layed down on the porch - motionless.

In the commencement speech entitled “This is Water,” the speaker came to highlight to the graduates at the commencement ceremony, what the “real world “was like because he thought they are not alert enough to know. He made reference to this through the anecdote at the beginning where the two young fish didn’t know what water was and of course water is life to fishes. Therefore, the speaker found it necessary to tell what life was really about through a commencement speech because of his opinion that they may have limited knowledge concerning it. In paragraph 6 of his speech, he states “The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what ‘day in, day out’ really means. There happen to be whole large part of adult