This Is Water

Have you ever wondered if fish know what water is? And if so you, you’ve probably concluded that they don’t. Because how are you supposed to recognize what surrounds you and encompasses your life completely. Other people would probably deny this once applied to their own lives, due to their own conviction of being completely right. David Foster Wallace addresses this issue in his commencement speech “This is water” delivered at Kenyon College in 2005, which is about being aware of the way your mind is normally structured.

The main intention of the speech is to convey a message on how people are restricted by the self-centeredness of their minds. Wallace employs various strategies, to get his message across the board to the graduates.

First of all Wallace addresses the graduates, by using a lot of adjectives. He does this to create a certain mood in his narrative, to make the situations he talks about seem more real and relatable. This is seen in the following quote where he talks about a routine situation at the grocery store: “And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line”. Here it is clearly displayed, that he tends to use adjectives with negative connotations such as: “stupid”, “cow-like” and “dead-eyed”. He does this in order to create a certain mood that supports his agenda. This way he influences the audience to understand the mind’s self-centeredness and negative outwards perceptions.

He also uses certain adjectives to create a tone that seems younger, in order to make his vocabulary more relatable to the graduating audience. This is seen with the use of words like “dead-eyed” and “cow-like”, which are self-invented words that consequently make him seem more adolescent and likeable. This way the use of adjectives also contains an intention of appealing to the audience.

Throughout the speech he applies a series of anecdotes to support his argumentation and message to earn him credibility. In the following example he mentions a trivial everyday situation: “I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas”. He uses this anecdote of a very normal situation to make his point, because it is probably something that everyone in the audience can relate to. This way he earns credibility, because everybody knows what he’s talking about. Consequently this also adds ethos to his appeal, as no one would argue against him, as they all know the situation. It’s also notable that the negative use of adjectives is still present. It’s also significant that it strongly supports his main message, as it produces the prejudice to the audience, that is one of his main points.