Consciousness According to David Foster Wallace

In 2005, Wallace gave a commencement address at Kenyon College that later became famous under the title This Is Water, and that both summarizes and schematizes Wallace’s thoughts on consciousness. The present essay, therefore, uses This Is Water as a cornerstone for analysis in order to indicate how the contents of This Is Water pervade all of Wallace’s fiction, how these contents lead back to the central theme of consciousness, and how, as a result, all of Wallace’s fiction can be said to explore the theme of consciousness. The method is as follows: each facet of Wallace’s discourse on consciousness is treated individually, in its own section or subsection. Each facet, also, is transposed from its theoretical formulation in This Is Water to at least one paradigmatic representation in Wallace’s fiction. The fictional examples cover all of Wallace’s four mature works, which should suffice to indicate the pervasiveness of the treated concepts throughout Wallace’s fiction. I have not included Wallace’s first novel (except for a brief mention) and first short-story collection for simple reasons of length. That these two works constitute further proof in defense of the present argument can be demonstrated, but in another setting. Here, delimitation was needed, I felt, for the sake of clarity.