This is Water

Confessions reveal intimate details about the speaker that humanize them in the audience’s eyes. Throughout “This Is Water,” Wallace serves himself up as an example to learn from. He discloses weaknesses, admitting, “a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded,” and that he tends “to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head” (3-4). Similarly, he posits, “Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe” (4). Wallace consistently cites his own shortcomings when elucidating unhealthy ways to think. The technique builds trust with the audience by dismantling any illusions that he is above them.

“This Is Water” uses instructive stories to emphasize the speech’s lessons. Wallace introduces the stories in his own metafictional style by pointing out common parable tropes. The self-conscious lens he applies to the stories allows Wallace to deliver lessons about lessons. He reasons that although parables are cliché tales, they “can have a life or death importance” (1). The fish parable lays his thesis: that people are most oblivious to life’s obvious details. He extracts the phrase “this is water” from the story and frames it as a mantra that reinforces the speech’s nucleus. Wallace also presents the religious man versus the atheist parable, which highlights the paradox of interpretation. He goes further, explaining that an event may have two meanings to different people, but no one questions the rightness or wrongness of those views.