Meron Kahsai

ENGL 115

Professor Rodrick

19 November 2019

Searching For Freedom

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 obtain freedom. 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 themselves are drastically different from one another. These characters embody the

theme of freedom and they show it through how they cope with their problems throughout the

course of the story.

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. In a Ted Talk by Albert Hobohm he says, “It was my lifestyle

that had produced this unsettled mind of mind which has now become nearly impossible to

control.”(Hobohm 1:41). In the Ted Talk he talks about how he found a positive way to control

his life because his thoughts had become too overwhelming for him to deal with. Maria does not

go down this route and instead allows her thoughts to take control of her life. She 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. During an interview with

Nicholas Rombes about Play It As It Lays he says, “She’s not there (nothing) and yet she is,
around the edges of all of Maria’s thoughts. She’s like a magnet at the end of the book, and all

the words are metal, and they’re all pulled toward her.” (Winnette, 2014). 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 her husband 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 Maria 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 rapes her. When Maria

wakes up one morning in the same room as BZ and his wife 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. Driving is a way that Maria copes with the emotions that continuously overwhelm

her.

Aside from Maria, 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. According to an article called The Truth About Abusers, Abuse,

and What to Do by Darlene Lancer, “The one thing they all have in common is that their motive

is to have power over their victim. This is because they don’t feel that they have personal power,

regardless of worldly success.”(Lancer, 2017). BZ 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 and 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.

The theme of freedom is shown in these three characters in the toxic ways in which they

try to find control in their lives. Maria showed this in the way that she would drive away from

her problems and continued to try to reconnect with her daughter. This only made her feel in

control of her life temporarily and would usually backfire later on. Carter looked for freedom

through his work and by trying to help Maria in hopes that it would give him some control in his

life. He never achieved this because Maria kept on getting herself in situations where he needed

to help her out of. BZ attempted to have control in his life by abusing Helen because he felt that

by taking her control it would give him some in his own life. When this did not work, he killed

himself in a last attempt to have freedom. The ways in which these characters attempted to find

freedom in their lives are different from one another but they all had the same results. Their

attempts at finding freedom proved to be unsuccessful in the long run and very toxic towards

their lives.
 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.

Hobohm, Albert. “How to stop your thoughts from controlling your life | Albert Hobohm |

TEDxKTH” Youtube, TEDx Talks, 2 May 2018,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Vj0-TVHiQ. Accessed Nov.13, 2019.

Lancer, Darlene. “The Truth About Abusers, Abuse, and What to Do.” Psychology Today, 6 June

2017, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/toxic-relationships/201706/the-truth-

about-abusers-abuse-and-what-do. Accessed Nov. 13, 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.