Document Type
Article
Abstract
David Foster Wallace begins his keynote address at the commencement ceremony for Kenyon College’s class of 2005 with a curious story. Two fish are swimming along when they happen across an older fish, who nods and says, “Morning boys. How’s the water?” The two younger fish swim along for a bit before the one turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” The point of the story, Wallace goes on to say, is “merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” He goes on to develop this rather simple observation into the powerful thesis that it is by paying attention to the most mundane aspects of our existence that we avoid going through our “comfortable, prosperous, respectable” adult lives “dead, unconscious,” slaves to the “natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.” Our essay is concerned with the question of just how Wallace goes about framing this compelling but counterintuitive proposition. We contend that his rhetorical approach depends upon a clever strategy of subverting the expectations of his audience, namely those expectations relating to what we call the “instruction manual” approach to modern American commencement speeches. Wallace stands before the graduates of Kenyon College not to bestow upon them the ivory-tower wisdom of one who has made all the right moves in life, but instead to illuminate the profound significance of what the graduates have always known merely by virtue of being human.
Repository Citation
Sirvent, Roberto, and Neil Baker. "The Problem with Wise Old Fish: An Analysis of Rhetorical Strategy in David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College Commencement Address." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 14, no. 2, 2014, pp. 1–15. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol14/iss2/4