Reading Reflection #5: Play It As It Lays
To conclude the reading of Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays” that tells a story about some episodes of a life of an actress named Maria, in English’s tongue that is pronounced Mar-eye-ah (4). There are fragments in Maria’s stories and her thoughts on so many things happen in her life. Her schizophrenic tendency and her drug abuse make her life like a juggling. The relationship with people she knows does not help her to have a hold of reality. The guilt of having abortion and a horror of people dying contribute to her nightmarish life.
From the earlier chapters, Maria keeps mentioning about the people who she does not want to be correspondence with anymore or be part of their life. She repulses Carter and the other people in her life that include BZ and Susannah, she says “You are all making me sick (190).” However, she still long for human connection, she makes conversation with a woman who owns a coffee shop. Later, the woman invites Maria to see her house. While Maria there, in the house, she cries and makes the woman asks whether she is pregnant. The uncontrollable emotion probably refers back to the previous time when she had abortion.
The desert is a metaphor to Maria’s life and everybody in the story, dry and barren. The desert is a place where Maria visits
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The heat, dryness and snake play tricks on them, they become psychotic and Maria is not the only one having psychological issues. She knows that she has issues and she is not denying that. Maria has her own explanation on the things she do, differ than Helene and Carter as a believer in cause-effect (203). Maria mentions to Carter about a man from the trailer camp who wants to talk to God by talking a walk and ends up dead bitten by a rattlesnake. She asks Carter if God answered the man as her resolution for a
Through the use of personal anecdotes throughout the article, Joan Didion helps to engage the reader
To continue on that thought, in Tortilla Sun, the girl is furious since her mother doesn’t understand why she doesn’t want to leave. Therefore, differences in points of view create tension because, the parents were alone in raising their children, and both narrators wanted to regain closeness to their
To begin, Matt and María have been through a lot together, and they still love each other after all of it. In the chapter “The thing on the bed” Tom lures Matt and María to go see a clone, the clone is scary and hurt and it scares María that Matt would turn into that, so she goes with Tom and leaves Matt behind. Later in the book on page 206 when María returns to the big house for Steven and Emelia’s wedding, María meets Matt in the tunnels. ““At last!” She cried, flinging her arms around him.
The discussion was more emotional, as we were all moved by her writing. Didion’s style of writing resembles that of a normal thought process. She is not writing rationally, she writes about her irrational actions and thoughts. She describes herself as “demented” during her first stages of grieving (Didion 125). The way she describes John’s, her husband, death is as if she lost part of her soul when she lost him.
The author depicts Marie cleaning June’s “scalp [which] must have burned.” and then she creates an image of how the pain affects June in which “she just kept her eyes screwed shut and plainly endured.” This connects back into Marie’s childhood when she had to bare several punishments in her catholic school but she wouldn’t give up, she didn’t let the pain affect her. The connections to her past aided in her fondness she displayed towards Marie “the devil had no business with June.” Marie had thought the devil was with her when she was younger and to see someone who the devil had no business with made June seem even more attractive to
Cofer writes “Mama put each of us in Maria’s place by describing her wedding dress in loving detail: how she looked like a princess in her lace as she waited at the alter” (Cofer 20). This puts each of the characters and even the reader in the place of Maria, as she stands at the alter and gets her heart broken. The story tells the reader that they do not want to be in Marias shoes, so they must be careful and cautious with men and who they choose to be their husbands. The story of Maria la loca is an example of letting love control who you want to become. Love is the reason Maria becomes an
Life changes in the instant” (Didion 3). Joan Didion was thoroughly unprepared for the sudden death of her husband. After life’s constant changes, Joan uses repetition in order to express her thinking process during this time. As she tries to
In the short stories “A Rose for Emily” and “The Story of an Hour,” the authors use literary devices to create vibrant female characters. These literary devices include diction, imagery, language, and sentence structure. “The Story of an Hour,” written by Kate Chopin, opens with a woman, Louise Mallard, who has a heart disease, and her friends must gently break the news to her that her husband has passed away in a railroad accident. She mourns briefly, but then realizes that she can now live for herself, instead of just as someone’s wife. Shockingly, she walks downstairs after fleeing from her friends’ horrible news, and her husband walks in the door.
In the except from the novel “ Under the feet of Jesus” by Helena Maria Viramontes shows the development of Estrella from being angry to understanding what she needed to do to succeed. The author uses figurative language and selection of detail to show the changes Estrella’s character went through, which reveals that knowing what things are is beneficial. The author uses figurative language like similes and metaphors to show Estrella’s frustration with her teacher and her understanding of tools. The author says, “ all that a jumbled steel inside the box… seemed as confusing and foreign as the alphabet she could not decipher.”
Mariam is raised by an angry and bitter mother and an absentee father who only visits her occasionally. Her relationship with the two is quite different. Her absentee father makes her feel special and she enjoys every moment they spend together, always looking
Her sphere and focus go no further than the family home, and she appears to be satisfied with her role as a wife andmother and is not much of a use outside the family home. For Antonio, Maria's role has always been that of keeping the family functioning; he remarks that she most often appears in the hears of our home.. (her) ketichen. She is easily labeles as a powerless wife, given that her usual responses to family crises is to retreat to a room in prayer. Antonio himself describes her as a "devout catholic" and a woman who believed that "the salvation of the soul was rooted in the Holy Mother Church" One would say that she was a faithful and loving housewife despite the contradictory behavior of her husband; she is powerless when it comes to family arguments, choosing to flee the scene and to pray ahaihfklalkj. As a housewife, she is constantly around Antonio, causing different aspects of her personality to influence his beliefs of growing up, especially the thought of how "it was a sin to grow up and be a man ….
Literary Analysis of Incantation Alice Hoffman 's powerful story takes place during such a hard time; the Spanish Inquisition in which our protagonist, Estrella de Madrigal faces an arduous decision between her best friend and the Spaniards. “Estrella de Madrigal thought she knew herself: daughter, granddaughter, dearest friend. But the truth is rare in this cruel, unforgiving century in Spain.” In the novel “Incantation,” Alice Hoffman has developed a meaningful yet a ubiquitous theme of how the infamous jealousy can destroy a person in many forms uses the literary devices such as simile and personification. Hoffman 's use of simile develops the theme that jealousy can destroy a person in many forms.
Mariam longed to place a ruler on a page and draw important-looking lines”(Hosseini ). Mariam is an example of how women are banned from an education and whose life could have been changed by education. Instead of being educated, she is sheltered by her mother and lives the rest of her life without high expectations of herself. Nana teaches her that an Afghan woman has to endure the life that is chosen for her because she does not have a say. Nana even says "There is only one, only one skill a woman like you and me needs in life, and they don't teach it in school.
In the text it also says, “Maybe he would do something crazy, like crash the car on purpose, to get back at her, or fall asleep and run the car into an irrigation ditch. And it would be her fault.” This connects to theme because, Maria needs to be thankful for her family and, she is not acting very thankful according to this quote. This conflict is another main part of the theme. As one can see, Maria is not very grateful towards her
The burning symbolizes the force of eros consuming the subject which causes the subject pain. The ‘cooled’ and ‘burned’ also create a juxtaposition that can be analyzed to express what turmoil the mind is undergoing. The subject directly says, “I was crazy for you” This line clearly expresses how significantly the madness has advanced because she admits, that the longing made her crazy. However, after the object is obtained the fire is slightly distinguished the subject is not as