What "Wit" Suggests About Redemption

Wit, written by Margaret Edson, is a story of redemption. The story portrays Vivian, the main character as a person trying to redeem herself for her un-compassionate pre-cancer life. Vivian struggles to redeem herself by trying to fill an emptiness inside her. She tries to fill the emptiness she feels with her interactions with Susan, a nurse, and Jason, a researcher on a "fellowship". While she is doing this she is also struggling with flashbacks of a life lesson that was taught to her by her English professor, Ashford. Vivian struggles with the fact that Ashford told her that a scholar cannot be sentimental. She realizes that her following his advice is the reason she is dying of cancer alone, because her lack of compassion limited her socially.

The fact that Vivian wants to seek grace in spite of her fatal condition shows that she is disgraced with her pre-cancer life. It also shows that though she is disgraced with it, she has accepted what she has done in her life and now wants to redeem herself. Vivian wants to live the rest of her life giving to people what she had never given them before. That is, her compassion. Vivian begins to hate and shun her relationship with her professor of English in university. She sees her as the root cause of the problems she is experiencing now. Her professor had given her advice that she had wrongfully followed, and now she was regretting it, dying of cancer alone. That advice given to Vivian by her professor was that a scholar should never be sentimental. She followed this advice and so strictly she isolated herself from other people and now was dying, alone. This shows that Vivian understands why she is in the present situation she is. Vivian has become more down to earth with her acceptance of her situation, and the acceptation that she is now an inferior human being in her new home, the hospital. This acceptance shows that Vivian knows her present situation and has maturely not tried to rise above it. Vivian's acceptance has led to her understanding, and ultimately to her will to do something to make it better.

What Vivian must do now to truly redeem herself is not only accept her situation but to make it better with her new found knowledge of why she is in it. Vivian wants to fill in the empty feeling she has caused by years of lacking compassion for other people. Vivian tries this first with Jason, whom she sees as intelligent. She sees him as a person in the pursuit of knowledge. A pursuit similar to hers. Vivian thinks that since she and Jason have similar goals that she could fill her emptiness through the sharing of their knowledge. Unfortunately Vivian finds out that Jason is just like her former, uncompassionate self and she quickly falls out with him and begins to look at him with a similar dislike towards her former English professor. With the failure to get anything from Jason Vivian turns to her nurse, Susan, who she had been avoiding conversation with before because she saw Susan as inferior intellectually