This process is especially difficult for her because it requires her to change her mind about a few things, particularly her assumption that the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual excellence is the most valuable part of life. She is thus forced to face the likelihood of her own impending death. Over the course of the play, Vivian gets sicker and sicker, both due to her extremely aggressive chemotherapy and due to her worsening cancer. Bearing, is helping her read a book called The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, which spurs her lifelong love of language.

Ashford, about misunderstanding the punctuation in a John Donne sonnet. In another, she is being admonished by her graduate school mentor, E. In one flashback, she is diagnosed with cancer by Dr. Narrating the play also allows Vivian to present flashbacks of her life. As Vivian explains in various monologues, irony is also a major theme in Donne’s work, which is concerned with life’s “big questions” like death and God, but usually ends up losing itself in its own wit and intellectual quandaries. This separation between Vivian’s narrator-self and her character-self establishes the play’s dramatic irony, in which the audience knows that Vivian is going to die before her character-self does. As the narrator, she knows how the play-and her story-is going to end, but as her character-self, she does not. Vivian oscillates between narrating the action of the play and acting in the scenes. Vivian admires Jason for his drive and sees her younger self in him, although she is often uncomfortable with their odd role-reversal in the context of the hospital this time, her fate is in his hands. Coincidentally, Jason was once a student of Vivian’s, during a semester in which he challenged himself to ace the hardest classes on campus. He, too, has a work ethic and a passion for knowledge that mirrors Vivian’s. Jason Posner, the most accomplished medical fellow in the oncology unit, is charged with administering much of Vivian’s care. Harvey Kelekian, who is also a university professor, and the two have a lot in common, including their relentless work ethics and their bemusement at undergraduate students’ lack of academic motivation. The play begins in the oncology unit at the university hospital, where she is receiving an eight-week, experimental chemotherapy treatment. She is also an indomitable force in the academic field of seventeenth-century poetry (particularly the sonnets of John Donne) and a professor in a university English department. Vivian Bearing, the play’s protagonist, is a fifty-year-old woman with stage-four ovarian cancer.

Wit play margaret edson