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Analysis Of Joan Didion 's ' Play It As It Lays ' Essay

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Elise K, Millay EGL Essay #2 Play it as it lays: A few scenes in my mind Joan Didion’s Play it as it lays describes the life of one Maria Wyeth, small time actress and ex-wife of Carter, a mildly successful film maker in Hollywood. The book follows her decline and retreat from the company she used to keep and her quest to find meaning within the absurdity and cruelty that is life. Within the book there’s a great deal of Maria’s inner thoughts that we are exposed to within Didion’s close third person narrative. However, one way to see the characters in Play it as it Lays is to look through the characters perceptions of each other, notably in the case of her ex-husband Carter. By looking at how Carter is treated by and treats Maria we can have insight into Both of them as characters. Carter, Maria’s ex-husband is one of the few characters we get to see from the first person perspective briefly in the beginning. By giving us these brief testimonies of the other characters, we are allowed to see how the other characters perceive Maria through their own biased language and inflection, something that the third person used throughout the rest of the novel in a sense cannot do, it being an omniscient factual presentation of Maria’s life leading up to the death of BZ. The beginning of Carters testimony, which appears to be directed to the mental hospital describing how he see’s Maria’s general behavior. Note the beginning “Here are some scenes I have very clearly in my mind” (13)

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