When Dr Wit Bearing Play Summary

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When Dr. Vivian Bearing is telling her story, she acts as both the player and the narrator of the play. The plot jumps between a chronological timeline of her finding out about her cancer and her treatment progression, to her commentary of her own life and her past experiences as a teacher. In many ways, the entire play is a flashback, told as though she is already dead to begin with, and is just a ghost recounting various moments leading up to her death, pausing to examine past memories that blend with future events. Chronologically, her story follows that of many cancer patients: diagnosis, treatment, and death. Bearing realizes this to begin with, as one of the opening lines in the play has her comment, in a very meta fashion, how she thinks she’ll die at the end. The plot of the play follows her life as she progressively gets sicker and sicker. Her beginning moments of embarrassment and suffering, for example, having to get a physical exam conducted by a former student, pales in contrast to her losing all her hair and throwing up all the time. Over the course of the play, she is losing physical capacities and …show more content…

Bearing begins to recite her life story when she was waiting for all the scans to finish, describing her research on 17th poetry and her teaching at the university. This recitation is not what is chronologically happening, but rather a moment in time that was important to Bearing. This happens again when Jason and the other doctors begin their grand rounds. As Jason is rapid-fire describing all of the various parts of her body, Bearing is commenting on the moment itself. She describes how the grand rounds remind her of her old courses, only this time the text the students analyze is in fact, her own body. The commentary Bearing provides offers more of a insight to her mind, how she analysis this specific moment in time and connects it to another point in her

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