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Empathy In David Foster Wallace's This Is Water

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In David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water”, the underlying message of having empathy and being aware in daily life is conveyed through a series of didactic stories and platitudes for audience comprehension. He opens his speech talking about the lack of awareness with a didactic story about fish not knowing what water is. With eloquence, he connects several other stories to explain the “default setting” of man’s solipsism. He describes the irony between the of man’s egoism to how society looks down upon selfishness. In reality, most people unconsciously place themselves as “the absolute center of the universe” (3). By juxtaposing the two streams of thought, the reality seems unmoral and conflicting. The answer is the choice of an individual to

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