This is Water- David Foster Wallace

Prompt: In what ways could Wallace’s theory about education be applicable to the writing of Alice Munro? Justify your conclusion.

            In the commencement speech, This is Water (2009), Wallace examines the pivotal impact of education in our daily lives. Specifically, Wallace expresses that true freedom acquired through the means of education is the ability to be conscious, sympathetic, and adjusted.

Throughout his commencement speech, Wallace discusses various topics such as “the difficulty of empathy” and “the essential lonesomeness of adult life.” The liberal-art system teaches students how to think, and essentially how to escape our “hard-wired default-setting lens of self.” He suggests that being conscious of what we choose to pay attention to, changes the way we establish meaning from experience in our daily lives. Wallace encourages the reader to consider that while we are confronted with negative experiences, we always have a choice. When one has mastered how to think and be aware, one knows they have other options. The trick, however, is to continue this “capital-T Truth” in our daily consciousness. Wallace states that real freedom is “being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day… The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race”—the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

To illustrate this theory to the reader, he exemplifies this conscious awareness in a daily situation—one which is yet to be discovered by the graduating seniors of Kenyon College—; the definition of “day in, day out.” The daily boredom, routine and petty frustration an average working adult experiences after a tiring day at work while shopping in an overly crowded grocery store showcases the importance of the work of choosing. If one doesn’t make a conscious decision about what to pay attention to, one is going to feel miserable every time when going grocery shopping due to the hours of queuing at the checkout desk, and other people who are in your way. Contrarily, when one has the power to choose a different approach one may experience a meaningful, sacred unity of things. By controlling how we translate meaning from experience through consciousness, which education stimulates students to do, we will “die a thousand death” during our lifetime. 

This introduces the ability to develop social perception, empathy and most importantly, emotional intelligence through literature. In the New York Times article For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov, Belluck suggests that literary fiction allows for better social skills due to the exposure of imagination which motivates readers to connect with a character’s sensitive and complex personality. Stemming from Wallace’s theory, this can, therefore, be applied to Alice Munro’s literary fiction such as her short stories Boys and Girls, Royal Beatings, Moons of Jupiter, Family Furnishings and Runaway. In my opinion, I believe that the power of literature is that readers are able to experience or emotionally connect to different characters, conflicts, times and situations which transcend their own context. When doing so, readers are equipped with a new and more aware insight to reinvent themselves and reflect on their role in shared humanity. This is evident in Munro’s literary work, as the reader is taken into the mind of the characters which confront deep-rooted traditions. In a prose style, the readers experience the world of human complexities which allow us to understand our similarities and differences in society. This social awareness is what constructs our consciousness and empathy, both in education and literary fiction. As Anne Lamott stated: “Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.”