Compare and Contrast Blog Post

In the “This is Water” speech by David Foster Wallace and “Morrison’s Nobel Lecture” by  Toni Morrison, the two speeches are opened up with an attention grabber. In “This is Water”, Wallace uses a fish story to open up the speech and in “Morrison’s Nobel Speech”, it is opened up with a “Once upon a time” story header. The two speakers then go on and talk about the viewpoint. Wallace talks about the outlook of a person and the outlook of others. He states an example of the attitude we tend to have as individuals which is “Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.” He states this as “our default- settings” that is hard-wired into us. With this it is hard to see what happens from the perspective of other people who are in the same situation that you are in because it “tends to be easy and automatic” to focus on yourself. In this Wallace states that “learning how to think is learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”

Toni Morrison’s Nobel Speech is a speech about an old, wise, blind woman who is well respected and has a high reputation with those who lived in the town near her. A group of young people visits the woman one day to ask a question that would determine her disability. Because the woman is blind, they ask whether the bird they held was dead or alive. The woman responded after a long moment of silence with the answer of “ I don’t know”. At this point, she shifts the “attention from assertion of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.” The woman get upset at the children for making mockery of her and rebuked them for what they’ve done. At the end of the day, the children wanted knowledge and an insight of how the old wise woman sees the world.

The two speeches are similar because they both have a similar style of language and focus on “being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” They are also different because Wallace’s speech explains how you can change your mindset and view things differently and Morrison’s speech shows how you can choose what to pay attention to and how you respond from what you perceive.