'This Is Water' vs Munro
'This Is Water' by David Foster Wallace explains how to turn your way of thinking away from your default setting. He explains that everyone has a default setting -- the way we react to a situation by only thinking about how it impacts ourselves. We should change our way of thinking by considering what everyone else might be going through. The idea is that we are learning what water is. If we are fish, we are surrounded by water. The water is what is happening around us, but we do not really know what the water is until we learn how to think in a different way. This teaching is applicable to the writing of Alice Munro. Her stories are based around the development of a character and realizations they experience in their lives. Considering that her stories follow a protagonist, we are given an insight to much of what the protagonist is feeling and thinking. In the stories, the protagonist would be considered the centre of the universe. Wallace discusses that we all see ourselves ...