Play It As It Lay By Joan Didion Analysis

Becoming the person that we want to be, and accepting the things we can not change are the first steps down the path to finding out who we truly are as a person. However, trying to find our “self” can be extremely difficult in some circumstances. There are several influences such as friends, family, social media, along with many other external factors that can get in the way of seeing ourselves as a unique individual. Along with these external influences, we can also blame one more thing for making it hard to identify our “self”, and that one specific thing is simply ourselves. People can be completely resistant to accepting what is actually going on in their lives which can force them to constantly have a mental image of what they would prefer

their life to be like, and how they want to present themselves, even if it is nothing like who they really are as a person. Unfortunately, how this image can get in the way of someone else seeing who a person actually is, that person herself can be distracted by that image. Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion gives us a perfect example of someone who has a problem with identifying who she really is. By using imagery, underlying meaning and symbolism, and recurring theme, Joan Didion is able to show us how Maria Wyeth avoids who she really is through her huge disconnect with reality.
Through imagery, Joan Didion is able to give us the perspective of how Maria Wyeth avoids who she is because of her disconnect with reality.

In Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion gives us the scene of how Maria views the world around her in a pleasant way after having her abortion, she write: “The late sun seemed warm and benevolent on her skin and everything she saw looked beautiful, the summer pulse of itself made manifest.” (Didion 84). With this, Joan Didion is able to show us how Maria Wyeth is not even able to acknowledge the fact the she has just went through with an abortion. Instead, in that moment, Joan Didion gives us the imagine of a place that is warm and happy which suggests that Maria Wyeth is unaffected by what she has just done, or possibly does not realize the effect on her life that it will have. Maria Wyeth could possibly be using this as a way to believe that nothing bad has actually happened in her life, and that she is not someone who has just went through with a horrible thing that she did not want to do in the first place. When Joan Didion writes, “By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria Wyeth and other.”, we are given the image that shows Maria Wyeth as being nothing in that moment (Didion 170). Maria Wyeth does not know what is real and what is fake, and feeling as if she is one with air, pace and time we can see that Maria Wyeth at this point can feel how she is disconnected from reality and what is going on around her in Las Vegas. Since she can not tell the difference between who she actually is and what is around her, we can assume that she feels as if she is becoming what is around her which suggests that she is losing sense of self, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff suggests about Maria Wyeth in her critique, “She appears to deny even self itself…” (Wolff

130).
In Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion is able to give us different underlying meaning and symbols to show how Maria Wyeth disconnects herself from reality. When she says, “Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant”, Joan Didion could be trying to show us that Maria Wyeth herself does not know what her life really is (Didion Chapter 9). Joan Didion is suggesting that Maria Wyeth has to try to extremely focus on what is going on in a situation in order to realize that something critical is actually happening in her life, and by saying “whatever that meant” also suggest that Maria Wyeth is still in denial even in her own mind. With Joan Didion saying, “It came to her that in this scenario of her life this would be what was called an obligatory scene, and she wondered…just how long the scene would play.”, it suggests that Maria Wyeth uses “scenes” to symbolize events in her life (Didion Chapter 11). Maria Wyeth does not see her life as anything more than separate scenes, like scenes in a movie. It suggests that she does not want to believe that the things that are happening in her life as real, in the sense that she does not think of them as something that will have any significant effect on her. We can see in the literary analysis of Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “It is a way of looking at the world which tacitly asserts that there is no intrinsic, inherent meaning in the relationship of the part to the whole.”, we can assume that Cynthia Griffin Wolff would agree that Maria Wyeth uses this method as a way of disconnecting herself from reality (Wolff 132). Joan Didion also writes, “For days during the rain she did not speak out loud or read a newspaper.” (Didion Chapter 34). We can also assume that this symbolizes that Maria Wyeth is trying to avoid reality, because newspapers remind her of the things that have happened and she does not want to deal with them, which keeps her away from herself and her own thoughts.
Throughout the entire story, Joan Didion uses a recurring theme of avoidance that suggest Maria Wyeth does not want to know what is happening in reality, which in return keeps her from identifying with herself. We can first observe this theme before the abortion at the beginning of the story while Maria Wyeth is talking to her husband, Carter, about what to do with about the pregnancy. We see that Maria is thinking of something completely different when Joan Didion writes, “It seemed to her that they had once been to dinner at somebody’s house who lived off San Vicente around here, she could not remember whose house it had been but there had been Japanese food…” ( Didion Chapter 11). Through this we see that Maria Wyeth is extremely disconnected from reality because she is avoiding the problem at hand by remembering and thinking about an event that is completely irrelevant to the important things going on in her life at the moment. We see this avoidance during the conversation between the man on the phone and Maria when they are setting up the abortion time and place, “ ‘The doctor will want to know how many weeks.’ ‘How many weeks what?’… ‘How advanced is the problem, Maria’ ” (Didion Chapter 14). Joan Didion is able to show us that Maria Wyeth does not want to come to terms with what is actually going on. She acts as if she does not know what she is about to do. Through all of this we can assume that Maria Wyeth does not want to identify with the person that she has become.
As we move further into the book, right before and soon after the abortion, we can continue to identify this recurring theme of avoidance and disconnect. When going to meet the doctor for the abortion we see this same kind of disconnect with what is happening when Joan Didion says that Maria sees the scene in this way, “She was a woman parking a Corvette outside a tract house while a man in white pants talked about buying a Camaro” (Didion Chapter 24). This suggests to us that Maria Wyeth absolutely disregards the fact that she is about to get an abortion, but instead acts as if this is just an ordinary day. In Cynthia Wolffs analysis she write, “Maria Wyeth, the central figure in Play It As It Lays, rehearses her faults…to confirm her own essential disconnectedness…” (Wolff 125). This statement also suggests that Maria Wyeth does not want to recognize what she is actually doing. When Maria Wyeth says, “I can’t go to the hospital. I told you before, I’m working.”, we can see that even though Maria Wyeth could be bleeding to death, she refuses to believe that it is anything severe because she is too busy working (Didion Chapter 31). We can assume that she is not thinking about, or concerned with herself, which can also be seen by Cynthia Griffin Wolff critique when she refers to Maria as “…doomed to destruction because of her inability to translate these feelings into meaningful action.” (Wolff 124). This can obviously mean that Maria’s “self” is doomed because she will not face the reality of her life as it is happening.
Thanks to Play it as is Lays by Joan Didion, we are able to observe a person who is unable to identify with who she truly is because she is very much disconnected with reality. I was able to give just a few of the ways that Joan Didion uses imagery, underlying meaning and symbolism, and a recurring theme to demonstrate how Maria Wyeth does not give herself the chance to find “self” because she is not able to view her life from a real stand point. Although we are given plenty of opportunities to become who we want to be, we can also be faced with the difficulty of feeling as if we are not able to. In Maria’s case, she can not fully understand what is going on in her life because she does not want to accept what has happened, and the person that she has been. She would rather remove herself from the reality of things, rather than to accept and handle the things that are happening to her, and take responsibility for the decisions that she has made throughout the story.