Although Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays （1970） is unquestionably a study of the modern malaise and an exploration of the futility of existence in a crumbling and decadent society, one must be careful not to assume that Maria Wyeth is an existential Everyman. She is a victim of absurdity, but hers is a very specialized case; she is an intelligent and sensitive woman, a type of human being who is quickly aware of the complexities and metaphysics of ordinary existence. Moreover, her victimization is not due to society, but to herself. She is primarily the victim of her own ego weakness and her suffering is largely self-inflicted; she is, in terms of contemporary psychoanalytic practice, a narcissistic personality. She has so objectified everything around her that she reacts reductively, comprehending the general nature of the people and events of her life, but not their individuality and uniqueness. Everything she encounters she deals with as if it were an archetype, dismissing its “otherness,” its existence as an entity independent of her for significance. The trappings of her life and the people she is surrounded by are self-objects, props she experiences as part of herself. Her disintegration in the novel finally reaches the point where she reduces herself to a mere concept, a point where she does not exist even for herself.

In Maria's defense, her environment provides her with few reference points for healthy, integrated existence, a condition which augments her descent into “nothingness.” Play It As It Lays clearly belongs to the subgenre of Hollywood novels, and as such, the world it portrays is governed by the metaphor of the cinematic image: romantic illusion in surface representations with an almost total devaluation of integrity, depth, and substance. Maria is an actress, surrounded by film people and their retinues. In this illusory setting, the people who form the cast of the metaphoric movie of her life are themselves all vacuous narcissists, solely concerned with their individual roles. Maria's challenge in this world is to function as wife and mother, a role dictated to her by her director-husband, Carter, but due to her lack of a sense of self, she founders in these roles. By extension, her problem becomes one of direction and control: lacking a formal “director,” she lacks control, both internal, or subjective, and external, or objective. Unscripted, her life becomes a paradigm of aimlessness.

In structure as well, the novel is suggestive of a screenplay, a juxtaposition of brief scenes that often end in a static tableau. Four “camera-views” are involved in the novel's 87 scenes, beginning with the longest, a first-person account in the voice of Maria after she has survived the events of the main narrative. Two brief narratives are next presented by Helene, ostensibly her best friend, and by Carter, in which the reader is invited to contrast the position of the institutionalized protagonist with the supposedly healthy people who had been closest to her. By their contrast, these opening scenes reveal Maria coming to grips with a new awareness of self, beginning a positive reassessment of her life, while her supporting cast evinces only bitterness and unaffected narcissism. The first 67 scenes of the body of the novel retrace the previous year of her life and chronicle the events that led to Maria's breakdown, presented in third-person narration. With scene 68, the voice of Maria that opens the novel reemerges, continuing in seven interspersed scenes to close the narrative in scene 84, completing the circularity of the novel in the symbol of her new objective—to live in the present, to “watch the hummingbird.”

The principal events in her life begin in the action antecedent to the autumnal, infernal atmosphere of scene 1. Raised in the desert village of Silver Wells, Nevada （now part of a military installation）, Maria fled her gambling father and her frustrated mother to become a model in New York. Dominated there by her lover, Ivan Costello, she had a breakdown when she learned of her mother's death, a probable suicide in an automobile on a lonely stretch of desert highway. Guilty at not having responded to her mother's depression at their last meeting, she wanders New York until she meets and marries Carter, who gains his reputation by filming Maria, a docudrama of her life. Transplanted to California, Maria has a child, Kate, who is born retarded, the victim of “an aberrant chemical in her brain.” Apparently at Carter's insistence, Kate is institutionalized and the marriage begins to fragment along lines parallel with Maria's personal disintegration.

The main narrative of the novel opens in September, after the summer of her separation from Carter, and Maria is again pregnant. However, she is unsure of the father, who may be either Carter or Les Goodwin, a screenwriter with whom she has apparently had a brief affair. The novel then elliptically describes her abortion （at Carter's direction）, her divorce, and the fragmentation that results in her confinement in a clinic.

In treatment, Maria announces that “from my father I inherited an optimism which did not leave me until recently,” and what the novel explores is the failure of her belief in cause and effect relationships, her faith in purpose. She is a woman who wanted to believe in reward and punishment, in an external controlling factor to her life that would be both predictable and just. But when confronted with her mother's suicide, Kate's retardation, and her pregnancy, she begins to realize—if not to understand—that the external plan in which she had placed her faith has failed. But Maria is not so much a character suddenly cast adrift in a chaotic world as she is a woman who resents a world that she realizes has no inherent meaning. Her tone is less despair than resentment, for she seems to assume that there should be a pattern of order and that she is being deprived of a natural right. She assumes, because she holds no system of belief, that the systems of all the people she encounters must be false and that others are deluding themselves; only she is aware of absurdity and it is her special province, her private pain. Didion constantly juxtaposes her against others who suffer their own kinds of despair, such as “the thin beautiful girl with the pelvic abscess,” but Maria feels no sense of camaraderie, and, in fact, tries to avoid her fellow humans. Her only companion in despair is BZ, Helene's homosexual husband, but she refuses to grant even to him her stature of seriousness and shows him little true compassion. Again to Maria's credit, however, BZ is hardly a worthy candidate for her empathy. In his narcissistic glee at having discovered the “nothingness” of his own life, he is often sadistic in taunting her with the emptiness she feels, but she is quick to dismiss his life with, “I'm sick of everybody's sick arrangements.”

This sort of reductive intellectual snobbery, or “narcissistic homeostasis,” is characteristic of her relationship with BZ. On their first meeting, he is intensely attracted to her, presumably intellectually because of his sexual orientation and his topics of conversation. His interest in her is genuine, and he is drawn to her because he senses an emotional companion for his despair; however, she has little more than tolerance for him. He believes he knows her griefs, and probably does, but never realizes that her passivity and lack of control have thrown her into isolation and are the source of the depth of her indifference to him. He tells her, “You're getting there,” but she must ask where, to which he responds, “Where I am.” His condescension sparks her need to feel differently, to reject despair; nonetheless, her reply is the emptiness of a truncated chapter. While she feels her own pain intensely, she cannot empathize with such intensity of feeling in others, which is most clear in the episode of BZ's suicide. He tells her, albeit elliptically, that he plans to overdose, and her comment is a flippant, “That's a queen's way of doing it.” With their knowledge of Helene's affair with Carter, their bond has a renewed immediacy. When she asks why he came to her, he says, “Because you and I, we know something. Because we've been out there where nothing is. Because I wanted—you know why.” Maria replies, “Just go to sleep,” and even after she realizes that he has taken the pills, she does nothing. This is the behavior of an anesthetized sensibility; it is the apathy of the narcissistic personality.

Maria's empathic reaction to BZ's suicide, if not to BZ himself, is the culmination of another form of death-wish that permeates the novel: her highway driving. In an attempt to superimpose a purpose on her life, an artificial sense of direction, she begins the novel with ritualized driving on freeways. Heinz Kohut observes that the narcissistic personality, “sensing the rapid and dangerously increasing fragmentation of the self which precedes the overt outbreak of the psychosis, attempts to counteract it by frantic activity.” Sensing her own fragmentation in the month following her separation from Carter, Maria attempts to create form from her chaos: “to pause was to throw herself into unspeakable peril.” Only when she realizes that her driving is a manifestation of her attempts to get back to Carter does she abandon it; “after that Maria did not go back to the freeway except as a way of getting somewhere.”

Representative of the automobile culture to which Maria belongs and suggestive of her role as a traveler and questor, driving also has other implications in the novel. Delighted in her ability to negotiate difficult and dangerous maneuvers behind the wheel, Maria is obviously manifesting an overt form of a death-wish, but she may be signaling an even deeper subconscious desire for destruction. Guilty at having failed to respond to her mother's self-destructive signals, her driving might represent a desire for a reunion with the mother, since her mother's suicide was in an automobile. In her attempt to alleviate her own guilt at her treatment of her mother, Maria overcompensates in her reactions to Kate, self-deceptively believing that the child is capable of functioning in and completing Maria's idealized notion of domesticity. She attempts to bury her feelings for her mother in her attentions toward her child, but she can only feel frustration and generate more guilt in herself: vainly attempting to believe in cause and effect relationships, she seeks justification for having been punished with the child's affliction. Only at the end, in treatment, does she begin simply to accept Kate for what she is and begin to unburden herself of her double sense of maternal guilt.

In her other relationships, although few candidates are worthy, Maria never admits the possibility of finding security or meaning in friendship, and she dismisses everyone who does not offer to complete a conventionally romantic scenario. Her affair with Les Goodwin seems to have been tentative in the past, but the idea of an idealized relationship attracts her. She arranges an assignation in Oxnard （ironically prosaic as a setting） and busies herself with the usual trappings of illicit behavior. But the incident holds no romance and is a failure. She tries to resume the exaggerated role of Ivan Costello's lover because of the artificial security she remembers, only to be disillusioned by the ugly reality and the pathetic silliness of the pose. But without voicing her feelings, Maria seems to feel that the men have somehow failed her, without recognizing the burden her distorted idealization has placed on them. Her romantic grasping is in sharp contrast to the reality they offer; her impetuous calls meet with what she realistically should expect: to “Take me somewhere,” Goodwin replies, “You got a map of Peru?,” and Costello asks, “You want to know what I think of your life?”

Her abandoned attempts at achieving a romantic state are perfectly understandable in the context of her accelerating disillusionment, but she cannot be excused for the opacity of her escapism. Twice she tries to choreograph the same situation, twice fails, and twice flees the failure rather than admit defeat. Her romantic concept of herself as validated by being another's lover is still intact; she gains no insight into herself from these experiences.

Her attempt to reconstruct her affair with Costello also suggests another of Maria's romantic self-indulgences: a retreat from the present and a reconstruction of the past, for as she admits while in treatment, “I might as well lay it on the line, I have trouble with as it was.” （In fact, her treatment seems to require her to deal with this, for as she begins her history, she says, “So they suggested that I set down the facts, and the facts are these: My name is Maria Wyeth.” Indicating a positive reassessment, she begins with an assertion of self.） In times of stress, she dwells on the experiences, or rather, sensations, of her childhood. These attempts at achieving a naïve simplicity and sense of order collapse, however, when she realizes she was not even aware of her mother's death and that she is the only one who remembers, much less values, the details of her home life. She rejects Benny Austin, an old friend of the family, because he reminds her of the illusory nature of her escapist memories, and when she guiltily realizes she has probably hurt him, she tries to repent. But even here she fails, for characteristically, her information is wrong and he is lost to her. Again, Maria simply moves on.

Because she offers nothing of herself to people, Maria receives nothing, cultivating emptiness as a defense. Because of her inability to see other people as individuals, Maria feels no need to share her life, feelings, or behavior. These elements combine to underscore the reader's perception of her isolation and how much of it is self-imposed. The most outstanding quality of this retreat is its tone of superiority, an intellectual egotism that superficially scans, classifies, and dismisses anything Maria feels is “not-I.” For example, when racked with guilt over her abortion and looking for comfort, Maria recalls an abortion story told to her by a fellow model, whom she names only incidentally. She dismisses the story, however, for she finds no possible connection between the two of them: “In the end it was just a New York story,” foreign and unrelated to her. Likewise, Maria buys huge quantities of unneeded food to avoid seeming to be one of “them”: young, single women in circumstances identical to hers. In attempting to validate her individuality, she refuses to accept who she really is; to defend against emptiness, she becomes grandiose: her perceptions must be superior to everyone else's, and she belongs to no one or no group. She voyeuristically participates in parties and gatherings, watching others involved in a spectrum of emotional response, never extending herself, resenting their presence on the stage of her life, and barely suppressing the nausea she continually feels in the presence of others. The slightest human contact, if it holds any promise for self-revelation, sends her retreating to the bathroom with dry heaves. To remain cohesive, she must affect a stance of distinct superiority—her perceptions are more delicate, her emotions more valid, and her life more important.

Manifesting what Freud calls “the narcissism of minor differences,” or the inability to recognize sameness in those one is closest to, Maria is bored and unempathetic with the small fragmentations of Helene, with whom she maintains a superficially close relationship. When Helene shows a rare crack in her polished facade, using the absence of her hairdresser, Leonard, as a tangible symbol for her own despair, Maria makes only a languid gesture toward soothing her before the vacuum of another chapter ending again signals Maria's lack of response, her inability to empathize. If Maria realizes that Helene's reaction to Leonard's absence is very little different from her own neurotic fixation on plumbing, she fails to indicate that perception.

The level of repression evident in Helene's fragmentation, representative of a partially conscious awareness of the lack of a virile man in her life and her compromised marriage of convenience, parallels Maria's repressed feelings about her abortion. Aware of the bland domesticity of the house in Encino where she has the operation, Maria comes to associate the doctor's flushing of her fetus with all plumbing and begins to have nightmares about stopped up pipes. When the sink backs up in her Beverly Hills home, she makes a futile attempt to regain the control over herself that she sacrificed in passively allowing the operation by moving to a furnished apartment on Fountain Avenue. She tries to assuage her guilt by turning toward Kate; self-deluded, but with genuine emotion, she fails miserably in trying to stage a conventional Christmas dinner with the Goodwins. Attempting to recreate herself in the apartment, rejecting her immediate past, she becomes obsessed with “the peril, the unspeakable peril, in the everyday.” But this denial of reality is also a failure, for one morning, she thinks the shower is slow to drain and her repressed guilt overwhelms her. She returns to Beverly Hills, aware that “There would be plumbing anywhere she went”; she knows she cannot escape her guilt through pretense and simple flight.

As with Maria's addresses, Didion's selection of physical details signals the superficiality and isolation of her central character: the scene is Hollywood, the milieu is the movies, and Maria is a professional poseur. She is trained in role-playing, in containing and masking expression of the true self, and the aesthetic distance she employs in her work is also the substance of her private life. Kernberg observes that:

highly intelligent patients … may appear as quite creative in their fields: narcissistic personalities can often be found as … outstanding performers in some artistic domain. Careful observation, however, of their productivity over a long period of time will give evidence of superficiality and flightiness in their work, of a lack of depth which eventually reveals the emptiness behind the glitter. Quite frequently these are the “promising” geniuses who then surprise other people by the banality of their development.

In her profession, Maria manifests the grandiosity of her false self, but in the course of the novel, the promise she once held dissipates. She works only once, on a television segment of Interstate 80, and performs only adequately. Although she wants to believe in the validity of work, even her professional self is beginning to fade; she begins to lose yet another self by which she can identify herself, although she still wants to believe herself to be an actress.

In this setting, stereotypical for its superficiality, Maria allows herself to be sucked into ritual action and response, as if following a script, jealously guarding self from what she feels would be exposure. That she refuses to acknowledge the substance of the society and values that surround her, including the people closest to her, comes as no surprise in these circumstances, but her seemingly conscious relegation of herself to the same level is surprising, especially since she is aware of the narcissistic superficiality of her environment. Only when she relaxes her pose is she aware that she is “watching the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing.”

To her, Carter is no more than “husband,” even though she feels an emotional longing that defies such a categorization. He cannot emerge as a vital human being to her （perhaps largely due to his own inadequacy, as revealed in his opening section）, but remains what his role dictates. She objectifies and abstracts him to the degree that they cannot have conversations, even about the things she feels most deeply; she enacts internal scenes that have prescribed dialogue. Before her penultimate resignation, when she meets Carter in the desert, Maria is fully aware, if somewhat opaquely, of the nature of their relationship, even if she tries not to understand it. When she first contemplates going to him, she kills the desire by experiencing what she knows would happen:

Whatever he began by saying he would end by saying nothing. He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion. “Oh Christ,” he would say, “I felt good today, really good for a change, you fixed that, you really pricked the balloon.”

“How did I fix that.”

“You know how.”

“I don't know how.”

The incident would end by her trying to “shake him out of what she could not see as other than an elaborate pose,” their meeting would degenerate into unattractive and noncommunicative posing on both their parts, and the encounter never even takes place. Maria is aware, at least, of the formulaic quality of their interaction but somehow still feels compelled to act her part passively, afraid to step out of character and be herself.

Her full awareness of the duality of her perceptions of their relationship is displayed when she does encounter Carter for the first time in the novel. She tries to define the nature of their marriage, for Maria is fond of facile labels, and as she begins to speak, she is suddenly aware that: “Something real was happening: This was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.” Here she self-consciously adopts a role, knowing that it is destructive to an important aspect of her existence, fully assured of her ability to hide her real emotions. Knowing that prescribed behavior will result in actions and words contrary to her desires, she yet assumes a character and they quickly alienate each other. “Anesthetized,” she is unable even to cry at her emotional betrayal of herself.

By the time she confronts Carter with her pregnancy, she has so objectified him that she can only deal with herself in the same terms. After she tells him, “it came to her that in the scenario of her life this would be what was called an obligatory scene, and she wondered with distant interest just how long the scene would play.” Here, she has completely removed herself from the situation; she seems no longer to have any conception of her own self as she goes through the motions of living her life. Maria, as Carter's wife, is a character with a script, an abstract quality in the realm of “not-I.”

That evening, while recalling former friends as merely a set of facts, she thinks back on Carter's reactions to her announcement: “Maria tried very hard to keep thinking of Carter in this light, Carter as a dropper of friends and names and obligations, because if she thought of Carter as he was tonight she would begin to cry again.” In this situation, characteristically, her true self begins to emerge and she thrusts off any attempts it might make to impinge on the facade of self she has constructed. She is too afraid to let her feelings come forward, afraid that the process would stir emotions which would complicate the vision of simplicity she has created for order. In her admission to him that she is unsure of the father of her unborn child, Maria makes Carter vulnerable and fears this vulnerability and her own power to create it:

She wanted to tell him she was sorry, but saying she was sorry did not seem entirely adequate, and in any case what she was sorry about seemed at once too deep and too evanescent for any words she knew, seemed so vastly more complicated than the immediate fact that it was perhaps better left unraveled.

Maria makes her encounters with Carter fail because she wants them to, because any attempt to deal with her immediate situation would threaten the surety of her internalized scenarios. Failure is predictable and safely handled; her repertory for her wife role embraces many easily adopted reactions. Unthinking acting allows her to feel order and meaning, however negative. Such behavior and thinking are obviously self-destructive. They are easy, require no effort for a skilled actress, and provide no obstacles, do not threaten to require her to think, feel, or reveal herself; thus, by passively accepting the role of guilty party, she risks no possibility of exposure and finds a convoluted and false security in knowing she cannot be harmed or rejected while vulnerable. As Kohut observes, narcissists self-impose isolation because of “their inability to love,” and they are “motivated by their conviction that they will be treated unempathically, coldly, or with hostility.”

Her one touchstone to what she thinks is her inner reality is Kate. But in the year before her treatment, her faith in her child as a salvation is as arbitrary as her list of things she spontaneously decides she will never do. Her concept of the child denies the reality of Kate's retardation, and her thoughts about Kate and her own behavior toward her are self-indulgent. Maria believes what she wants and ignores the unpleasant. When Carter mentions the disruptive effect of her excessive visits on Kate's adjustment, Maria obliquely asks, “Adjustment to what?” Similarly, her visits to the institution are attempts at actualizing fantasy and have far more to do with the mother's reassurance of herself than with the child's welfare. Significantly, Maria imagines the child most strongly when indulging in self-pity or romantic reverie; her fantasies of home life with Kate include both Goodwin and Costello. Kate is a concept to Maria, a self-object, someone Maria needs to complete herself—even though her affection for her daughter is undoubtedly authentic, if misguided.

The central issue of Maria's unborn child and abortion functions to allow the reader to view her when she is most vulnerable. Her feelings about what she had done are closely associated with the emotions she has for her mother and Kate. She tries to objectify the unborn child and deal with it as an abstract concept, but she cannot, for despite her efforts, she is very much involved in what she does. For the first time, she cannot call up her grandiosity to protect herself; she cannot separate herself from her actions because the abortion is a symbolic killing of her own unborn true self.

Despite her wishes to the contrary, Maria cannot deal with this particular aspect of her life effectively; she is haunted by plumbing, the symbolic representation of her guilt, death, and her concept of the living child, Kate, becomes increasingly unreal. At one critical point in the narrative, the reader is allowed to view Maria absolutely nakedly, and that occasion corresponds to a day symbolic to her, the day her aborted child would have been born. While driving, she pulls to the curb:

she … put her head on the steering wheel and cried as she had not cried since she was a child, cried out loud. She cried because she was humiliated and she cried for her mother and she cried for Kate and she cried because something had just come through to her, there in the sun on the Western street. …

She is flooded and overwhelmed by images she has repressed, and one can finally see Maria completely exposed, not only to the reader, but to herself as well. But again, the experience does not seem to be constructive at this point and it offers her no genuine stability; her self-esteem plummets and she begins a ritual of self-abuse and degradation that includes such actions as lead to her pathetic encounters with Larry Kulik and Johnny Waters.

The breakdown incident indicates the duality of Maria's reactions and the complexity of her repression. The invulnerable facade she has constructed allows no such immediacy—these things are the “not-I”—but these things are obviously central to what the reader recognizes as the real Maria. Her behavior in the novel, including the thoughts the reader is allowed to see, is artificial and belongs to the character Maria is trying to convince herself she is. But clearly, Maria also has another level of reaction, one which embraces the people and emotions she works to dissociate herself from. By denying herself empathy for others, she loses her ability to see herself as a subject. Her world is an aggregate of simple abstractions, and the role she assigns herself is no more complex or real than the roles she imposes on others. To avoid pain and vulnerability, she must be reductive in her perception of herself as well as her perceptions of the world around her.

Maria's collapse occurs when she has objectified her life to the extreme. She goes to the desert, wandering about the wasteland of a town, aware of the emotional complexities and the ugliness of the relationships between Carter, Helene, BZ, Suzannah Wood, and Harrison Porter. She is no longer capable of reaction. The culmination is, of course, BZ's death and her institutionalization. But as she leaves for the desert, her own voice, the one which introduced the novel, begins to reemerge in the short, intrusive chapters. In these first-person accounts, the reader sees the institutionalized Maria coming to terms with the role she had adopted throughout the novel; they are accounts of her realization of what she had done and been. While they do not signal recovery, they do indicate that she is becoming aware, that she recognizes that she has plunged as far as she can go and is beginning a positive reassessment of herself. The stychomythia, or internal debate, of these distinctly different narrative voices also provides readers an indication of Didion's own stance to her protagonist. Readers are not allowed at this point to identify with the disintegrating Maria; rather they are suddenly elevated above the decay of her personality. In this, Didion may be indicating her own criticism of Maria's narcissism, forcing readers to recognize that the novel itself is not inherently narcissistic: the alternating voices strongly suggest the infusion of a new sense of subjectivity.

Maria first acknowledges her misguided pattern of objectification when she admits she has been “burdened by the particular,” recognizing that she has been avoiding subjective response by escaping it through abstractions. She begins to understand that she is not entirely alone in her perceptions of herself, that others observe both her and the world from positions as objective as hers have been. Her shedding of the latent, artificial romanticism comes with the awareness that she must “play it as it lays,” accept life as it comes. For the first time, she feels the need to justify what she had done, particularly her participation in BZ's suicide, and she recognizes the complexity that Kate represents as a unique individual. For the first time, she explores what she thinks might have happened to her and formulates her first rational and viable plan for the future; however slender a hope it might offer, she is beginning to form a sense of order that embraces a truly subjective response to the world, Kate, and herself. The last of these interpolations closes the novel and reveals Maria as an inchoate existentialist, a woman unburdened of pretense and romance who can survive knowing the absurdity of the world. She now possesses the capacity for survival because she can say “why not” live. These are the reactions of a woman who, beginning to make contact with her true self, can now recognize and exercise individual choice.

Her assertion that, “I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird” represents a new understanding of her life and existence in general; she can now say, “I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what ‘nothing’ means, and keep on playing.” But Maria's sense of nothingness is not the same as BZ's nihilism, which drove him to suicide; her sense is one that allows her to continue. She rejects her earlier, destructive belief in external control, in reward and punishment, and she contrasts herself with Carter and Helene, who “still believe in cause-effect.” She is willing to accept the present, unembellished by analyses or alterations of the past and unfettered by considerations of the distant future. Her opening lines, “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask,” signal her abandonment of her quixotic search for causes, answers, and motivations; “To look for ‘reasons’ is beside the point.” She is beginning to recreate herself as the woman she is now, not as the daughter-model-lover-wife-actress-mother she was cast as before.

While she knows that “Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes,” she has also come to realize that “Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing.” She is still in treatment and she realizes that she has work yet to do. She must tame her grandiose self and find her true self; to this end, she adopts an existential stance: “You call it as you see it, and stay in the action.” Her plan is clear, simple, and realistic: “Now that I have the answer, my plans for the future are these: （1） get Kate, （2） live with Kate alone, （3） do some canning.” Disburdened of guilt, having rejected others' assignment of her role, Maria is beginning to take responsibility for and control of her life for the first time.

Kernberg defines the characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder as follows:

grandiosity, extreme self-centeredness, and a remarkable absence of interest in and empathy for others in spite of the fact that they are so very eager to obtain admiration and approval from other people. These patients experience a remarkably intense envy of other people who seem to have things they do not have or who simply seem to enjoy their lives. These patients not only lack emotional depth and fail to understand complex emotions in other people, but their own feelings lack differentiation. … When abandoned or disappointed by other people they may show what on the surface looks like depression, but which on further examination emerges as anger and resentment, loaded with revengeful wishes, rather than real sadness for the loss of a person whom they appreciated.

Clearly applicable to Maria, this diagnosis also includes another dimension, wherein “the devaluation of objects and object images on the part of patients with pathological narcissism creates a constant emptiness in their social life and reinforces their internal experience of emptiness.” This same position is argued by Kohut, who observes that “the patient will describe subtly experienced, yet pervasive feelings of emptiness and depression,” while feeling “that he is not fully real, or at least that his emotions are dulled. …” Clearly, in diagnostic and therapeutic terms, this is the condition from which Maria suffers and for which she is being treated in the framing narrative.

The essential duality of Maria's selfhood is signaled early in the novel by her feelings about the two movies she has been in. She likes the commercial film because she sees herself in it as another person, objectified, abstract, and well within the realm of the “not-I”: “the girl on the screen seemed to have a definite knack for controlling her own destiny.” She prefers the sureness of its neat conclusion to the other, which “represented some reality not fully apprehended by the girl Maria played”; it is simple, objective, and patently false. The other movie chronicles a day in her own life and exposes her, the Maria she tries so disastrously to conceal. “She never thought of it as Maria. She thought of it always as that first picture.” But the film represents everything Maria tries to avoid yet has passively accepted: “The girl on the screen in that first picture had no knack for anything.” Her use of past tenses indicates her purposeful distancing of these contrasting images of herself, and her attitudes toward the films serve as a paradigm for the true self/false self split that has controlled all aspects of her life.

This duality reveals her essential conflict, self-definition, and her relationship to the world. A basic but false sense of superiority provides her with a comfortable distance from others, who seem to her only to offer the possibility of more pain, but she distances herself from herself in the process, losing touch with people, friends, her environment, and finally herself. For these reasons, Maria is “thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.” Only when Maria allows aspects of the true self to reach consciousness can she finally begin to expose herself, be vulnerable, and accept the fact that she cannot reduce her life to a series of abstractions. And in the clinic, stripped of all but self, Maria seems to be beginning the process of rediscovery, one hopes, to reemerge as an existentialist who has control and can build a life around herself, rather than creating a static tableau which simply includes a character she arbitrarily chooses to call “Maria.”