Meron Kahsai

ENGL 115

Professor Rodrick

12 November 2019

Play It As It Lays Draft

In the book Play It As It Lays, we see the characters struggle to find a correct path to the

life that they want. There is a theme of the characters wanting to have some kind of control in

their life and attempting to do so. This is seen the most through the characters Maria, Carter, and

BZ when they run into problems in their lives and try to solve them in unhealthy ways. Since all

of them face different problems and difficulties in their life, they way that they try to fix them are

drastically different from one another.

Maria shows this theme in the many different ways that she tries to have control in her

life. Most of these ways only make her feel in control of her life temporarily and sometimes they

don’t even seem to work at all. Maria attempts to find control in her life in the way that she

continues to try to reconnect with her daughter and how she continuously moves away from the

location of her problem. Maria wants to reconnect with her daughter Kate because she feels that

if they are together again, her life will become better and she would be more happy. It would also

be one less thing in her life that she doesn’t have control over. When she becomes pregnant and

the baby isn’t Carters, he tells her to get rid of it and she responds to him, “If I do this, then you

promise I can have Kate?”(55). He doesn’t give her any guarantees but she has the abortion

because she doesn’t want to risk losing her daughter more than she already has. She still holds

onto the hope that if they were to become a family again, she could spend as much time as she
wants with Kate without having to call beforehand or have to wait. In this way, Kate is

somewhat of a hope to Maria that her life can be better than how it is.

Another way in which Kate tries to find control in her life is when she drives away from

the location of her problem. She does this in hopes that if she’s farther away from the problem it

would go away or stop affecting her, even though that is never the case. At the beginning of the

book it says that some nights Maria is filled with dread when she thinks about the people in her

life and how her life is and that “she never thought about that on the freeway”(18). When Maria

is driving she feels that she is in control of her life even if it is just for that moment. She shows

this when she drives a specific route, when she drives away after sleeping with an actor, and

when she changes her mind and drives to Vegas after Ivan Costello forces her to sleep with him.

When Maria wakes up one morning in the same room as BZ and Helene with almost no memory

of the night before, she tries to keep her mind off of it by imagining different things. In the book

it says, “When that failed she imagined herself driving---she slept and did not dream”(162). Even

when she is not driving, just the thought of it calms her down and gives her a temporary feeling

of control.

The theme of control is shown through BZ when he manipulates the people around him

so he can have what he wants. He feels that he is not in control of his life because he is

struggling to care about anything and feels indifferent to the things that happen around him. In

the story his mom pays for Helene to stay with him and he takes advantage of that by abusing

her. In the novel he tells Carter, “Isn’t Helene a nasty, Carter? Haven’t I got a bitch for a

wife?”(45). BZ treats Helene like she is worthless and finds control in abusing her because she

can’t stand up for herself. He likes the feeling of controlling others because it makes him feel

like he has some control in his own life. This ends up not working in the end because Helene
decides to sleep with Carter. This causes BZ to feel even more out of control and in a last attempt

to take control of his own life, he ends up committing suicide. Before he kills himself Bz tells

Maria, “Some day you’ll wake up and you just won’t feel like playing anymore”(212). By the

end of the story he has lost all sense of hope and doesn't see life as worth living anymore. BZ felt

that if he couldn’t have control of his life when he was alive, he would be able to find some

through his death.

Carter expresses the theme of attempting to have control of his life by going to work and

by trying to help Maria. Whenever he is dealing with something stressful, which most of the time

is connected to Maria, he spends his time at work or in social gatherings. He feels that he doesn’t

have control of his own life whenever Maria gets into trouble or when he feels like she is a risk

to herself. Carter shows his concern about her wellbeing when he tells her, “I do not. I do not

think you can take care of yourself”(176). He wants Maria to join him at the desert because he

wants to keep an eye on her. Carter doesn’t do this out of care and he shows that when he tells

her, “Why don’t you just go in that bathroom and take every pill in it. Why don’t you die”(32).

It’s most likely that he helps her because of the fact that they used to be married that he feels that

he has a responsibility to make sure that she is okay. The responsibility of checking up on Maria

and having to help her causes a huge stress in his life. When he’s not checking up on Maria he is

mostly at work in various locations. At his work he can go out with his friends to social

gatherings and also meet up with some of the actresses and sleep with them. This helps him to

keep his mind off of Maria and the trouble that he feels she brings along with her.
 Work Cited Page

Didion, Joan. Play it as it lays: A Novel. 2005 paperback edition. New York, Farrar Straus and

Giroux, 1970. Accessed Nov. 12, 2019.

Winnette, Colin. “Nicholas Rombes on Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays.” Electric Literature, 14

Nov. 2014, https://electricliterature.com/nicholas-rombes-on-joan-didions-play-it-as-it-

lays/. Accessed Nov. 12, 2019.