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Chapter 18
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Play It As It Lays, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Meaninglessness
Gender Inequality and Identity
Loss and Recovery
Superficiality
Summary
Analysis
A bank teller responds skeptically to Maria’s request to withdraw $1,000 in cash, so Maria lies and tells him she’s taking a trip to Mexico. Maria returns to her car and counts the cash. She realizes that she’s been thinking about Les Goodwin all day, and that it’s become hard to distinguish him from the rest of her former lovers. Over the past month, she’s begun to regard all of them as part of a collective whole, with “no beginnings or endings, no point beyond itself.”
Maria’s inability to distinguish Les from her other lovers reflects her cynical attitude toward romance and human connection. She sees all her past romances as a singular failure that has “no beginnings or endings, no point beyond itself.” She sees her lovers not as people but as means that have failed to achieve an end: Maria used to believe that love and connection could transform and repair her, but she now believes that love has “no point beyond itself.”
Active
Themes
Maria tries to remember her past sexual encounters. She recalls driving out to the desert and drinking beer with Earl Lee Atkins when she was 16, the smell of Lava soap on his body. She remembers Ivan Costello in his bedroom in New York and in the motel in Maryland. She thinks of Carter and Les Goodwin. She remembers things clearly, yet none of her memories “seem to come to anything,” and she feels as though everything was a dream.
