Greasy Lake Stereotypes

Prompt # 1: "There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style when it was good to be bad when you cultivated decadence like a taste."

It is ironic that not only is the lake named Greasy Lake, but the individuals who hang out there are also referred to as being greasy characters as well. The 3 main characters find themselves surrounded by “dangerous” characters, and get stuck in the middle of a huge fight. As if things aren’t bad enough, the main characters then attempt to rape a girl that is with the man they just fought. Very soon after more people show up ready to join in the deviant behavior, all while in the presence of this dirty, disgusting lake. “I’d struck down one greasy character, and blundered into the waterlogged carcass of a second” (128). No matter what the main characters do, or how they react to the conflicts presented, they constantly find themselves in the presence of more greasy characters at the greasy lake.

The characters in “Greasy Lake” can be viewed in different lights. The narrator and his two friends, Digby and Jeff, are three mean boys whose lives seem to be centered around getting drunk and high from dusk until dawn. The narrator praises Digby and Jeff for their slick and dangerous lifestyles. Their skills consist of dancing, drinking, and “rolling a joint as compact as a Tootsie Roll Pop stick” (65) while on a bumpy drive. These characters scream trouble. They seem like harmless teenagers out to have a good time but it can be interpreted that these characters will attract mischief. After a night of bar-hopping, dancing, eating, drinking, and smoking, they decide to continue the party with a bottle of gin on the shores of broken glass and charred wood. These characters can be interpreted as young, naive, wild, reckless fools. The decisions these kids have been making the entire night have not been good ones. They have driven to bar after bar, consuming drink after drink. Obviously, their decision making is impaired. The reader should realize that the road the boys are travelling on is one that leads to a bad place. It is a place that has everything to do with Greasy Lake. It’s a place where dangerous things happen. The allegorical element that is found in the boys is

Greasy Lake is the story of three friends who are bad characters. Until they run into a situation where they question, just how bad they are. Just because they act badly and look bad does not mean they are. They are teenagers in a period, “when courtesy and winning ways [are] out of style when it [is] good to be bad, when they [cultivate] decadence like a taste.” (112) They look bad, wearing torn-up leather jackets, slouching around with toothpicks in their mouths and wearing their shades morning, noon and night. They have the attitude, they drive their parents cars fast, and burn rubber as the pull out of the driveway. They have the bad habits. They drink “gin and grape juice, Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai,

The theme in T.C. Boyle’s “Greasy Lake” is demonstrated when the narrator and his friends learn a potentially deadly lesson through a series of accidents, caused as a result of their reckless pursuit to be bad. The nature of life reveals to them that striving to be bad in order to be viewed as hip or cool can often result in dark accidents, with catastrophic consequences. In the beginning of the story, three adolescent boys believe themselves to be “dangerous characters” (Boyle, 131) and that “it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste” (130). However, they learn painful lessons during summer vacation that

Three young men are about to undergo a rite of maturity that will take them from innocence to experience and from the last vestiges of childhood into the opening round of maturity. The unnamed narrator and his friends Jeff and Digby are what would today be referred to as poseurs although what they are really are merely young men struggling to find their identity in an increasingly confusing world. Even so, it is the misplaced identification with gritty urban heroes of books and screen by these ordinary suburban boys that situates them into a place where Greasy Lake becomes the baptismal. Trouble begins with the trio makes a far more miscalculated misidentification: that of thinking that a car parked up at Greasy Lake belongs to their friend Tony Lovett. As boys—not to mention some more mature and

The story takes place in the 1960s, and amongst the youths of a town in Oklahoma, there is war. The two social classes, Greasers (the poor) and Socs (the rich), fight against one another, controlled by stereotypes, and two young teenagers change the history of it in a single night.

We often share large parts of our world view with our peers and our parents. That is because our environment is a key factor in defining who we are, and in the case of younger people, who we are to become. In the short story “Greasy Lake”, the narrator goes through a life changing event that begins to mold him into the person he will be. By using a mix of setting, allegory and characterisation in “Greasy Lake,” Tom Coraghessan Boyle brings forth the defining aspect of the late teenage years in young adults and how those years play a major role in the development of one’s world view.

"Greasy Lake" by T.C. Boyle is a tale of one young man's quest for the "rich scent of possibility on the breeze." It was a time in a man's life when there was an almost palpable sense of destiny, as if something was about to happen, like a rite of passage that will thrust him into adulthood or cement his "badness" forever. The story opens with our narrator on a night of debauchery with his friends drinking, eating, and cruising the streets as he had done so many times in the past. What he found on that night of violence and mayhem would force him to look at himself hard. This is a story of one man's journey from boyhood to maturity.

These four teens are on the same road in a world gone mad. Struggling to survive, this is a journey into the heart of darkness but also a journey to find each other and a place of safety. After fighting a lot and going through a lot the four teenagers have to fight at the end of the book when all of these mysterious creatures are attacking them all at once and they eventually get through them but there is still a problem one of them will have to

THE ROUGH LIFE Who had it bad? The Greasers or the Socs? The Greasers had a harder struggle in life. The Greasers had no money,but the Socs did. That was hard to be in school,work and have to pay for your own education.

Ponyboy Curtis and Johnny Cade, 14 and 16 years of age, disappeared from town right after the dead body of a boy named Bob was found. According to them, Bob’s drunk gang attempted to drown Ponyboy and Johnny was just trying to protect his friend, not trying to hurt anyone. Now these same boys save five children from a fire. Before the incident they were talking to their friend Dally about

During the heat of WWII, a plane was gunned down onto a tropical island creating a habitat full of school boys. They try to form an island society making Ralph in charge of the boys, And it all went south the other boys did not want to help build shelter or create fire. They were also rude to all of the young kids that were scared about monsters and all the fighting wild older boys.

It tells the story of three friends, Claude, Sheila, and Berger, who are dealing with a draft notice of one of their close friends. The main female character, Sheila is in love with both of her best friends. However, she is blinded by her activeness in politics and is unable to act upon her feelings for them. Finally, Claude decides to break from the pack because being a hippie is no longer his forte. Instead he decides to embark on a journey to Vietnam without any idea of the outcome. The rest of the group chooses the opposite by sticking to their roots and staying with family.

Teenagers often tend to follow the popular morality, as they grow and acquire maturity. In the story Greasy Lake, by T.Coraghessan Boyle, three 19 years old men are trying to be bad as the new popular morality depicts at this time. These three boys decide to finish their night at Greasy Lake. The story becomes disturbed when a “bad” greaser, Tony, arrives and the boys begin fighting until he is completely defeated, lying on the ground. Then, Tony’s girlfriend appears, but before going bad again, everything suddenly turns out the situation when the narrator faces a dead body. By the use of characterization and symbolism, the author suggests that the coming of age comes from experiences and from changes in moral development.