Rhetorical Analysis Essay On David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was an American Writer and an instructor at Illinois State University of English and creative writing. Wallace became the 2005 commencement speaker at Kenyon College in which he gave one of the best commencement speeches ever given. After his death three years later, the speech was printed in the Wall Street Journal and republished as a book. In his speech, Wallace made a lot of points and after thoroughly reading and thinking about them I can strongly agree with every single one of them. Such opinions were things that I had never thought about nor paid the littlest attention to, but after reading his speech I became fascinated. One of Wallace points was “how to think’ really means. In his speech, Wallace said,“Learning

According to Wallace, “default-setting”, is “to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self”. We are used to being the center of attention our own lives that is hard for us to put other people first, we tempt to be very self-centered and according to Wallace this is one of our default settings, we were born and grew up with them that is so hard for us to grow out of it. As human beings, we want everything to go our way and when it doesn’t we get mad and often try to blame others. Generally, we hold beliefs so deeply that we do not realize they can be questioned, our arrogance often makes it hard for us to listen and try to understand other people’s point of view. One example is religion, most of us were born introduced to one religion by our family and grew up strongly holding our beliefs, and we often judge other people’s beliefs, we often also debate about why our belief is better than the other person. Because self-centeredness is one of our “default settings’, we automatically judge people for their actions not knowing their reasonings and often times bother to listen or bother putting ourselves in their place. Wallace said, “There’s no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of” this often makes us ignorant to other people’s views or