Greasy Lake

“Greasy Lake” (1985) by T. Coraghessan Boyle (1948- )

The story in set in 1969 (while the war in Vietnam is raging on the other side of the world), just ten years after Sammy quit his job at the A&P. Much had changed over those ten years, including the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, ML King, and Malcolm X; the world was a very different place.

The narrator of the story is looking back (perhaps fifteen years) to a life changing incident that occurred when he was nineteen. He is clearly a very different and mature man, now, as he is telling the story, than he was at the time it took place.

DISCUSSION BOARD
Go to the Discussion Board and characterize the narrator (he is never actually named in the story), the OLDER narrator, not the nineteen-year-old he once was. Who is he now? What is his attitude now to himself back then? Is he laughing? Does he feel guilty? What does he think about the whole thing, and what makes you think so?

PAPER ASSIGNMENT
As always, your assignment is to provide a formal interpretation. What exactly did the narrator learn in “Greasy Lake”? What, overall, is Boyle’s point in the story? What does he want the reader to understand, to learn? (Please avoid the simplistic moralizing of ‘drugs are bad’ or ‘drinking gets you in trouble.’)
Begin your paper with a formal introduction, including the title and author. Summarize your conclusions in the first paragraph. Then, in the body of the paper, defend and enlarge upon your ideas, citing specific language and incidents in the story in support of what you have to say.

Points to consider:
Twice in the story the narrator say “This was nature,” once near the beginning, once near the end. What’s the difference between the two occasions? What changes does the narrator mean to imply with such a repetition?
At the beginning the narrator says that they were ‘dangerous characters,’ but a little over half way through he says ‘I was nineteen, a mere child, an infant,’ and by the end he says ‘I wanted to go home to my parents’ house and crawl into bed,’ and ‘I thought I was going to cry.’ What happened?
What is the ‘little epiphany’ the narrator has in the middle of the story?
There are many military metaphors and references to war in the story. How do these relate to the tone of the story and the fact that the time frame is during the war in Vietnam?
At the beginning the narrator and friends are ready to ‘party.’ At the end they decline the invitation.
Does the extremely sophisticated vocabulary provide any clues to who the narrator has become?