In his essay, "This is water", David Wallace Foster is addressing to us readers that the true freedom is received through education, he expresses that when he says, "Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-art cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "learning how to think". Which means the teaching of being adjusted, aware and sympathetic. "Control over how and what you think.” this is another idea that he wanted to us readers to take away from his essay as it's easy to let your thoughts take over you and thats what depressed people feel like. However, everything can change by challenging yourself to take over your own mind and control your thoughts.
This can be achieved by our choice on the different perspectives and daily problems that we go through everyday in our world that we eventually ignore because of our "default mode settings" in our mind during a typical day out. Wallace expresses through 'This is water" that we are able to control what we think and our thoughts portray our freedom, instead of letting the thoughts take over you negatively and create a barricade between you and your own freedom.
Achieving that freedom through our own consciousness is based on our ability to experience and create different perspectives of the world and your surroundings, a simple example to look at is the grocery store on a “typical day out.” This was a simple idea that as readers we all linked to as we felt that way, however instead of his thoughts taking over him he created a sympathetic relation between him and the people that eventually stood in his way.
David Foster Wallace also shows us the importance of fictitious thoughts as they power our minds with experiences. Wallace explained that through the ending of the grocery store experience where he checks out at the cashier and imagining to himself the lives and different situations that the rest of these people around him are in when he said, "Of course, none of this is likely to be true , as well it's also not impossible — it just depends on what you want to consider.” This makes us sympathetic as people, adjusted, and controlling of our thoughts which Wallace has also considered in his own experience. Our ego is one of our many flaws as we constantly consider ourselves the center of this world nay universe without even doing it intentionally.
"There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of."
The link between Alice Munro and David Foster Wallace can be related by his theory about education which fits in to the style of writing that Munro uses in all her stories that I’ve read by her, she creates character and human development which is developed throughout. Showing how humans can be generous and sympathetic an example from one her stories is Alfrida in Family Furnishings. As a reader it was hard to understand her character and who she really was which we eventually got to know towards the end. This encourages us as readers of her stories to be more understanding of the characters within the story and wanting to know who they really are, and getting different perspectives about them. Her stories awaken the emotional intelligence or (EI) through developing feelings and sympathy through the lives of not only the main character but however, through other characters that are in the story, such as in the story of "Moons of Jupiter" for example. Maybe another reason for Munro as an author and always wanting to keep her reader aware throughout the story is through emotional intelligence which is the ability to physically understand the role of each character within the short story as Munro tries to cleverly replace the reader from his perspective to the perspective of the character through the narration. In conclusion, the factor that emotional intelligence plays according to Wallace’s Theory is that if we are able to emphasize and enhance the emotional sympathy of the lives of not just one but many of the characters within a story it will be easier for us readers to understand each one of them.
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