'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 as the centre of the universe until we change our way of thinking. So, when reading Munro's stories, we should take ourselves away from centering the story around the protagonist, because there is much more to stories than just the protagonist's life. The teaching from Wallace is more applicable to characters who we know less about. For example, Neil in 'Passion'. He is an alcoholic, but we do not know what caused him to be this way. Wallace is telling us to think in a way that we can consider all the things that Neil has possibly experienced in his life that made him this way. Alfrida in 'Family Furnishings', we know about her from what the protagonist reveals to the audience. When the protagonist did not answer or return Alfrida's call, Alfrida did not call back. We must consider what Alfrida was thinking or what was going on in her life. Of course, we learn at the end that she had a child, and that her boyfriend was married. For Neil, we discover that his death did not look like an accident, nor was there anybody else involved -- we can assume that he killed himself. This reveals to us that Neil had an internal battle we were unaware of throughout the story. Wallace teaches us that that what we learn at the end of a story is water. Throughout a story we are collecting puzzle pieces, which would be the water we do not yet understand fully. At the end, we can fit all the pieces together to understand the full story, and it is revealed to us exactly what water is.