David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech Analysis

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Pages: 2

In his commencement speech at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace emphasizes the importance of personal and intentional choice in life as well as the acquisition of control over how and what to think.
The author begins his speech with the fish story, where he clarifies that the most crucial realities are often hard to see and talk about. Wallace explains that an enormous amount of stuff, people are mechanically certain of is completely erratic and even deluded. Against the parable’s backdrop, he argues that a liberal arts education is not just about learning how to think, but that it delivers the choice of what to think about. So, the liberal arts education provides a room to get rid of both biological and cultural default settings, seemingly