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

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