David Foster Wallace Water Analysis

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.

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

Water, although often taken for granted, is the lifeline of Earth. All carbon-based life requires some quantity of water to survive. However, in John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, water signifies much more than survival. The novel opens with Gene Forrester visiting The Devon School, his old boarding school. During the visit, Gene visits a marble staircase, as well as a tree, both of which cause him to recall memories of his old friend, Phineas. Gene tells his Devon memories, water becomes a key symbol in the story. Clean water, dirty water, snow, and bodies of water encapsulate Gene’s childhood recollections. Connections between water and Gene’s childhood began at the start of the novel, developing all the way through it, establishing water as

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

Many people tend to become frustrated with their daily lives and start to have a negative mindset of blaming other people for their problems. In David Foster Wallace’s speech, “This is Water,” he informed the audience of the importance for everyone to know they have a “natural default-setting,” which is the automatic way that a person feels they are the center of the universe and that negative situations are other people’s fault. He also discussed the importance of trying not to act in this “natural default-setting”, and try to think of problems that other people have to go through in their lives. The main purpose of Wallace’s speech was to persuade the audience to fight the urge of staying in their natural default setting to prevent frustration in a person’s daily life.

If one were to try to imagine a world without air, then it would certainly be very different than the world as humans know it. Since air is essential to the livelihood of most life on Earth, it could be considered an “important reality.” In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, “This is Water” to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College, Wallace states that “the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” (Wallace) Despite the necessity for air, most take its beautiful existence for granted. Wallace believes unawareness leads to unhappiness, and thus wants his audience to actively think about their surroundings. He

At the start of my journalistic investigation I stumbled upon a 2010 documentary by the explorer Wes Skiles titled Water’s Journey. The short film is available online free of charge and follows a scientific team of four as they traverse the Florida aquifer in real time. The goal of their mission was to explore and extensively map the inside of the Florida Aquifer for the first time. The four individuals on this groundbreaking mission included Tom Morris, a cave explorer and biologist, Jill Heinerth, a technical dive specialist, the Wes Skiles, and electromagnetics expert Brian Pease. Pease designed a revolutionary transmitter that was able to send signals through Florida’s solid rock and water below, which allowed for him and Skiles on the surface to actively track Morris and Heinerth as they explored the depths below.

David Foster Wallace’s speech “This Is Water” was spoken to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. In the speech he reflects on a unique way to think about yourself, other and the world around you. I conducted three interviews with people of different ages to see how they conform or contradict with Wallace’s speech. Martha explained how in college she was self-centered, “In college it was all about me, me, and me. And what I could get out of stuff,” (Martha Arieta). This relates to Wallace’s topic of the natural default setting. “Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor,” (Wallace pg.3). Wallace is explaining that

I was an impressionable ten year old the first time I heard David Foster Wallace’s famous “This is Water”commencement speech, the opening line of which is quoted above. My father showed it to me; from the time I was a toddler, he’s made it his mission to equip me for the future (once, when I was six, I found a responsible spending flowchart taped to my door). In accordance with his mission, he was adamant not only that I watch the speech, but also that I absorb it. Now, with the benefit of more years of experience, I can appreciate why the speech was so important to him. As I understand it, the basis of what Wallace is talking about is awareness, which is a fundamental part of leading a meaningful and connected life. Every single one of us exists as part of a larger context, a larger world; we’re surrounded by our cultures, communities, histories, and relationships, along with countless other influences.

One cannot truly change the world around without first mastering the art of looking beyond oneself and into the outside world. This idea of looking beyond oneself has been the focus of ancient and modern philosophers throughout the world. In “The Is Water”(2005), a commencement address, David Foster Wallace, a modern day philosopher, implies that people generally view the world from a selfish perspective and elaborates on how the world should work to reverse its self-centered ways. Wallace reveals his topic through a series of anecdotes, each highlighting a different way we are focused on ourselves and then providing a way to view each situation from a different perspective. Wallace’s purpose is to point out the faults in thinking only for

Life takes a strong toil when war strikes. People start to lose hope in survival and start believing in the wrong source of power. Revenge and world domination. It takes one to realize what truly matters, and that is life. But there are factors to lead to one’s survival and hope for a better path. In the novel that Linda Sue Park had written; a Long Walk To Water. Tells a story of compassion, bravery, and a little bit of luck, during one of the worst times in Southern Sudan. Told from a perspective of a young boy named Salva. Throughout the book, Salva had many factors that made survival possible for him, they include; Marial, Uncle, some luck on the way. These are the factors that helped him survive, even when tomorrow did not seem

How hard is it to do the right thing? In the article, “The Man in the Water”, many people did the right thing right until the end. “The Man in the Water” takes place in Washington D.C., where there was a blast of winter. It was a chaotic disaster that caught the nation’s attention. In reality, not everyone is willing to be the “good guy”. Everyone have once, thought of themselves more than others but, in this article, not everyone was selfish. Not being selfish, showed heroism and bravery. In the article “The Man in the Water”, Roger Rosenblatt uses conflict and setting to develop moral courage.

0.125 grams of a starch is dissolved in 100 mL of water at 25oC and has an osmotic pressure of

This paper discovers the water budget for Berkeley, California in comparison to Terre Haute, Indiana. The two cities precipitation differs throughout the twelve month calendar year where many of the heavy precipitation months are totally opposite. Berkeley California’s winters, where the majority of rain occurs and Terre Haute, Indiana where the rainfall is observed as consistently disseminated throughout the year evenly. This paper will also magnify geographic position, climate and elevation in contrast of the two cities that reflects the water budget outlined in Project 1: Water Balance defined in

No matter how water came to exist on Earth, there is no denying that it has become the basis for life as we know it. From the largest animal, to the smallest microbe, water is essential. Microbes, in particular, have made water their homes and their diversity within these freshwater aquatic habitats was tested in this experiment and the hypothesis put forward was that cleaner water, pond B, contained a higher biodiversity as compared to dirty water. Water from two different freshwater ponds, A and B, was collected and placed in beakers, six slides of each water sample were prepared carefully and methyl cellulose was added so the movement of microbes could be inhibited. The entire section under the cover slip was viewed and no area was left out of view, this was done by using an overlap of view method. Organisms spotted were identified using a key and the names and numbers recorded. After all observations, a table was created and further information was extracted from the table and put into graphs. It was found that dirty water contained a high biodiversity than cleaner water and the original hypothesis put forward was rejected.