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SUSIE: She's not what I imagined. I thought somebody who studied poetry would be sort of dreamy, you know?
JASON: Oh, not the way she did it. It felt more like boot camp than English class. This guy John Donne was incredibly intense. Like your whole brain had to be in knots before you could get it.
SUSIE: He made it hard on purpose?
JASON: Well, it has to do with the subject. The Holy Sonnets we worked on most, they were mostly about Salvation Anxiety. That's a term I made up in one of my papers, but I think it fits pretty well. Salvation Anxiety. You're this brilliant guy, I mean, brilliant—this guy makes Shakespeare sound like a Hallmark card. And you know you're a sinner. And there's this promise of salvation, the whole religious thing. But you just can't deal with it.
SUSIE: How come?
JASON: It just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. But you can't face life without it either. So you write these screwed-up sonnets. Everything is brilliantly convoluted. Really tricky stuff. Bounding off the walls. Like a game, to make the puzzle so complicated.
SUSIE: But what happens in the end? … His Salvation Anxiety. Does he ever understand?
JASON: Oh, no way. The puzzle takes over. You're not even trying to solve it anymore. Fascinating, really. Great training for lab research.
Jason is, of course, a mirror image of Vivian herself, devoted to the means (research) rather than the end (salvation, whether physical or spiritual). Only a very cold-hearted writer could leave her characters in such a hellish state, and before the play's end, both Vivian and Jason do find (or in his case, begin to find) redemption. Vivian's salvation is certain once she realizes the power of death and her utter helplessness in the face of it. As a teacher she had praised Donne's distrust of simplicity:
So we have another instance of John Donne's agile wit at work: not so much RESOLVING the issues of life and God as REVELING in their complexity.
As a patient enduring unimaginable pain, she admits that nothing could be less appealing than "Erudition. Interpretation. Complication."
Now is not the time for … metaphysical conceit, for wit. … Now is a time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness.
Vivian accepts the tenderness of Susie, and in a scene brimming with religious meaning, listens tearfully while her old Donne professor, Dr. E. M. Ashford, reads her the only thing on hand—Margaret Wise Brown's The Runaway Bunny, a book for children.
E.M: … "Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.
So he said to his mother, "I am running away."
"If you run away," said his mother, "I will run after you. For you are my little bunny."
"If you run after me," said the little bunny, "I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you."
"If you become a fish in a trout stream," said his mother, "I will be come a fisherman and I will fish for you."
(Thinking out loud) Look at that. A little allegory of the soul. No matter where it hides, God will find it. See, Vivian?
In the end, Vivian comes out of hiding, dropping all pretense, both metaphorical and literal. In a miraculous resurrection scene she steps from her nightgown, lets her cap fall to the ground, and sheds her hospital brace let (an act of God for sure—ever tried to get one of those off without scissors?). Naked and beautiful, she walks away from the chaos around her hospital bed toward a small light.
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