David Foster Wallace's This Is Water

David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” is a commencement speech to a group of graduating college seniors, telling them the harsh truth about life as an adult American. He utilizes this piece to ponder the problem of how and why we as humans view the world in the way we do, regarding our specific viewpoints and respective realities. He thinks upon this problem by analyzing the human psyche’s “default-setting” of being self-absorbed, and how by “learning how to think”, this cycle can be broken, using a commonplace example of a long day of work followed by a trip to the grocery store to showcase how all of us focus upon ourselves and our own intentions (3, 2). He ends up concluding that to live a common American life is “unimaginably hard”, and how we perceive this life and the world around us is what will grant us “awareness of what is real and essential” as we live it (8). Wallace states: “there is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of”(2). By stating this, he implies that every insight into life we gain is through our specific judgement. He goes on to mention how this impacts our perception of freedom, how our unique viewpoint may present us as having freedom, but how this only applies within our own “skull-sized kingdoms”, whereas true freedom is something akin to “being able truly to care
This is especially true regarding the types of language used: where Wallace uses words such as “repulsive” and “nonhuman”, Doty instead uses phrases like “fellow citizens” and “bound together” (Wallace, 5; Doty, 4-5). While “Still Life” focuses upon problems of connection, Wallace focuses more upon the personal viewpoint regard of this larger concept. The main point that ties these two pieces together is a quote from “Still Life” that particularly motivated my choice of it: “when we describe the world we come closer to saying who we are” (Doty,