Analyze why Wit is the perfect title for this work.
Wit is a powerful linguistic tool that promotes itself both on literal and metaphoric levels. It is an illustrious method of keen intelligence and sharp inventiveness. Nonetheless it creates a deep meaningful sense of pain, mortality, and acceptance.
The screenplay Wit teaches the reader, that at some level, language is a difficult bearing to embrace ones emotional feelings. It becomes insufficient to describe what is happening in ones life. In a pivotal scene, the young doctor Jason is performing his routine medical interview with professor Bearing. After asking her customary questions about prior and present medical conditions, he asks her to detail her pain. As much as she attempts to project her medical dilemma the doctor is in able to comprehend. This therefore suggests that ones’ always at a “wit’s” end if unable to embrace another’s grief.
Although wit is used in an attempted dance of meaning, neither Vivian nor Jason found language a satisfactory medium to increase understanding. Words fade into a pool of an emotionless display of pain. “I want to tell you how it feels…to use my words… I can’t” she is therefore forced to use her aptitude for using words and ideas in a quick inventive way to promote her sentiment. This suggests that even though the pain of death may overwhelm ones ability to describe their literal/physical pain it is incapable of destroying ones spirit.
Although language is a powerful medium that has the prospect of delivering information clearly, wit tends to promote the capacity of language to obfuscate. This is clearly demonstrated by the majority of the cast in this performance. For instance the medical language serves as a shield, allowing care providers the illusion of personable ventures. This is clearly demonstrated with Jason’s demeaning remark “keep pushing the fluids”. Even though he may feel such a “witty” comment may promote a sense of comfort; but it simply manifests itself in a shell of hopeless pity; However Vivian attempts to ratiocinate these medical slogans in order to subject to totalitarian acceptance.
Wit is promoted in John Donnes holy sonnet X: Death Be Not Proud, which directly mirrors that of Vivians life after cancer. The extensive analysis of the poems grammatical structure suggests that death is not the opposite of life, but simply a pause between life and the hereafter.
In the final chapter of Vivian’s life, her sense of wit and eloquent style of speech is reduced to sounds of pain and then to complete silence until her death. Language therefore is perceived as an alternative to the hospital and the emptiness it transcends, gradually fading into the abyss of death and Subjectively giving itself to the grief of silence.
Silence is not merely a weakness but spiritual potency. Ironically, speechlessness in the screenplay promotes its spiritual message. Even though she may have been tapped on the shoulder by death, death is reminded not to be proud; that while death may have won ones physical presence it is evidently powerless against the human memory from living on. In an extensive context, the sin and death of humanity is powerless to the redemption provided through Jesus Christ. Donne “witty fully” illustrates that death is a physical being and slowly with his words stabs at him/her until he finally kills it. This is mirrored at the play, where Vivian’s speechless body is seen yearning, Christ-like, onto the hereafter, into a transitional state between life and its aftermath.
“Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.” G.K. Chesterton