Array from matrix fields without quotations
You would need to join the array into a string, like so:

// Begin defining the response data for this entry
$data = [
    'title' =&gt; $entry-&gt;title,
    'slug' =&gt; $entry-&gt;url,
    'status' =&gt; $entry-&gt;status,
    'textArea' =&gt; implode(' ',$bodyBlocks)
];