Kelekian And Margaret Edson's Themes Of Immortality In Culture

Names like Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe are still iconic in culture, even years after their deaths. One could say that these names have “Immortality in Culture” a life after death, untouched by the human unconsciousness to forget unimportant useless knowledge. In the play Wit by Margaret Edson the reader’s opinion of “immortality in culture” is altered, in the work it is about what tangible effects a person can leave behind or what footprint they can make, not so much as such a small detail like their name. These characters: Jason Posner, Dr. Kelekian, and Vivian Bearing throughout the plot are faced with an existential crisis forcing them to look back on their past and ask the question what happens when they are gone or when a person

Doctor Kelekian and Jason feel as if they rank above Vivian with social rank and education, yet Vivian’s ability to learn and tolerance for education is much higher than theirs’. Vivian’s education has allowed her to take information then process and understand it, where Kelekian’s allows him to make a diagnosis and prescribe medications. Both Kelekian and Jason as doctors of science see themselves as the smartest people in the world, they like to talk over people’s heads with their expanded medical vocabulary filled with Latin and Greek roots.Vivian on the other spectrum uses everyday language to confuse those less educated than her including Jason and Kelekian. These all are clear signs of a superiority complex much explained by this excerpt, “we have built the remarkable edifice of modern science, which has allowed us to place members of our species on the moon. Yet we are at times both exasperatingly unable to behave rationally and abjectly powerless to solve some of our most pressing medical and social problems”(Superiority complex). For these three doctors learning never ends, like a sponge they absorb everything a try to take the information into consideration later on in life. For Vivian her entire battle with cancer was a learning

Kelekian, and Jason they questioned if what they were doing was worth it and if they were actually being themselves and not just an image of themselves. Faced with death, Vivian questions if her life was really worth all of the pain and suffering she put herself through. Towards the beginning of the work after hearing the diagnosis, Bearing states , “ I have cancer, insidious cancer, with pernicious side effects- No, the treatment has pernicious side effects. I have stage four metastatic ovarian cancer. There is no stage five. Oh, and I have to be very tough. It appears to be a matter, as the saying goes, of life and death,” (Edson 13). Vivian was always very tough, but towards the end of her battle with cancer her toughness ruptures she reverts back to childlike tendencies. In the scene with Ashford she shows weakness for the first time in the plot line, and actually refuses to hear the work of Donne. As an adult she never showed weakness and at that moment she mirrored an image of her progressive childhood. The very thing that she adored all her life had become a symbol for all of the pain she was enduring and her incomparable wit. Compared to Vivian, Jason comparedly remains steady with his opinion on himself, he constantly questions what in life is his purpose and why he is doing this clinical fellowship. He refers