Mental Change In Greasy Lake By T. Coraghessan Boyle

In his short story “Greasy Lake,” the lake with the community teenagers create a stereotypical scene of current youth pop culture. Many youth who read this story can find the ironic references and similarities with their lifestyle in today’s world. T. Coraghessan Boyle uses the setting of the story to expose a world lacking self-discipline and showing immorality amongst a community youth, which can sometimes be rather common today. This also aids in creating an atmosphere that surrounds suspense and impaired judgement to better develop the characters of the story. Boyle is able to achieve this by creating a setting with the story of the Greasy Lake and describing the Lake as both a setting and main character.

Tim Winton’s short story, ‘The Water Was Dark and it Went Forever Down’, depicts a nameless, adolescent girl who is battling the voices inside her head along with the powerful punishments at the hands of her inebriated mother. The key concerns of life and death are portrayed through the girl’s viewpoint as she compares her life with her sad, depressed mother. Anonymous as she is, the girl constantly makes an attempt to escape the outbursts, that come as a result to her mother’s drinking, by submerging herself into the water. An extended metaphor is used when expressing the girl as a machine and her will to continue surviving in her sombre life.

The discovery of the biker’s body is the turning point in not only the story, but also in the narrator’s life. In a short time, he has been beaten, has knocked out someone with a tire iron, almost raped a woman, found a dead body, and watched his mother’s Bel Air station wagon be destroyed. Which was all done for the rush of excitement. While hiding in the water that was previously seen as a tarn of doom, with all the nights occurrences spinning in his head, he has an epiphany. Standing there he realizes what becomes of “tough-guys” and discovers that he has found his salvation within his true self. Accordingly, as the narrator emerges from Greasy Lake, he is a new person with a newly discovered perspective. As the sun is rising and the songs of birds replace the sounds of crickets, he leaves the pool of once dismal waters (Boyle 118). This signals his rebirth and his baptism as a reformed adolescent.

The characteristic of slow work repeats in the two types of stories told by Fr. Boyle. The one that grabs the readers’ attention more describes the lives of people in detail and with resolution. Whether the youth he met ends up going to a jail or finds a job and a home in Homeboy Industries, we know to an extent what their stories are. We can understand and imagine the lives of the youth from childhood, the problems they faced, the way they went about handling them, and what Fr. Boyle thought and did during those times. The other type consists of brief mentions of the people Fr. Boyle ran into. He can only tell us what happened and what he hoped at the time, but we are left without fuller stories of the people. These unsatisfying accounts, however, are proof of the author’s intention for writing this book. We are not supposed to read about the lives and, really, the challenging situations of the youth and attempt to find solutions. Especially as a stereotypical student studying at Georgetown University, I tend to think I need to fix the problem and make the world a better place. But the purpose of the book is really to teach me to have compassion. So, the readers can notice from the two types of stories Fr. Boyle

In “Greasy Lake,” T. Coraghessan Boyle uses setting to portray the theme of the journey that one goes on to transition from childhood to adulthood. At the beginning of the short story, “greasy lake” was seen as this fun place that “bad guys” went to hangout. They smoked cigarettes, drank liquor, and gave their best attempt at finding girls. By the end of the story, it was a completely different place. The speaker found a dead body, his buddies almost raped an innocent girl, he nearly ruined

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

In T. Coraghessan Boyle’s short story “Greasy Lake,” there are many subtle historical references. These references pertain to different events that were happening during the time period that the story takes place, and help to describe different parts of the plot. Casual readers may not even notice these interesting little bits of information, but upon paying closer attention; they would become aware of the small, almost unnecessary references that make this story so fascinating.

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,

Many teenager yearn to be a part of adulthood. They want the freedom that comes with the ability to make their own decisions and not have to worry about what their parents think. One way young people try to show their parents and to the world that they should be admitted in to the adulthood world is making decisions that go against their parents advice. In the story Greasy Lake, T. Coraghessan portrays three teenagers now in college trying to show the world that they make the own decisions and that they are “bad.” The meaning of being “bad” in this story is not like being defective or like being bad at tests.

The author symbolizes the water as transition and spirituality, the lake is symbolized as the elusive badness the boys want so badly. The narrator notices that none of them are as bad as they try to act. After that night the narrator realizes he cannot make it in that life, rather the narrator wants to go to the safety and security of his home and parents.

Thus the narrator of the story, as an older and more mature man, tells the story as an introspective look back at his misadventures. The protagonist begins to gain some insight into his possible future while in the “primordial ooze” (Boyle, 119) of Greasy lake .After finding the floating body and dealing with the destruction of his mothers battered station wagon he is mre reflective of the situation he is in. The narrator, looking back at

Boyle, Tom Coraghessan. "Greasy Lake." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 7th ed. New York: Longman, 1999.

“The Swimmer,” a short fiction by John Cheever, presents a theme to the reader about the unavoidable changes of life. The story focuses on the round character by the name of Neddy Merrill who is in extreme denial about the reality of his life. He has lost his youth, wealth, and family yet only at the end of the story does he develop the most by experiencing a glimpse of realization on all that he has indeed lost. In the short story “The Swimmer,” John Cheever uses point of view, setting and symbolism to show the value of true relationships and the moments of life that are taken for granted.

The world of Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” exists through the mostly unemotional eyes of the character Nick. Stemming from his reactions and the suppression of some of his feelings, the reader gets a sense of how Nick is living in a temporary escape from society and his troubles in life. Despite the disaster that befell the town of Seney, this tale remains one of an optimistic ideal because of the various themes of survival and the continuation of life. Although Seney itself is a wasteland, the pine plain and the campsite could easily be seen as an Eden, lush with life and ripe with the survival of nature.

Nature has a powerful way of portraying good vs. bad, which parallels to the same concept intertwined with human nature. In the story “Greasy Lake” by T. Coraghessan Boyle, the author portrays this through the use of a lake by demonstrating its significance and relationship to the characters. At one time, the Greasy Lake was something of beauty and cleanliness, but then came to be the exact opposite. Through his writing, Boyle demonstrates how the setting can be a direct reflection of the characters and the experiences they encounter.