How important to what happens in this story is Greasy Lake ...

[storky111]

How important to what happens in this story is Greasy Lake itself? Whatdetails about the lake and its shores strike you as particularly memorable (whether funny, disgusting, or both)?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

How does the heroes encounter with the two girls at the end of the storydiffer from their earlier encounter with the girl from the blue Chevy? How do you account for the difference? When at the end of the story the girl offers to party with the three friends, what makes the narrator say, I thought I was going to cry?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

[Carissamariew]

Answer to Question 1

• Students can have fun demonstrating how Greasy Lake is the perfect setting for Boyles story. Like the moral view of the narrator (at first), it is fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires. There was a single ravaged island a hundred yards from shore, so stripped of vegetation it looked as if the air force had strafed it (par. 2). The lake is full of primordial ooze and the bad breath of decay (par. 31). It also hides a waterlogged corpse. Once known for its clear water, the unlucky lake has fallen as far from its ideal state as the people who now frequent its shores have fallen from theirs. (If you teach the chapter on symbol, hark back to Greasy Lake once more.)

Candace Andrews of San Joaquin Delta College argues that, while on the surface Greasy Lake seems merely to recount the misadventures of a nineteen-year-old delinquent, a careful reading will show that much of the story retells the narrators experience in VietnamIt is a tale of a young man who has been to war and back. For a writing assignment, she had her students list every reference or allusion to war, and she told them, Then bring your research together into some kind of coherent statement which supports the idea that the narrator is a Vietnam veteran. We do not believe, ourselves, that Boyles several references to war necessarily require the narrator to be an ex-GI. He would have followed the war news and come to feel that the war was senseless violencelike the action out at Greasy Lake on a Saturday night. When he tells us (in paragraph 40) that he and Digby looked at the girl like war veterans, we take that to be a metaphor: he too feels a sort of battle fatigue. However, you may care to check out Professor Andrewss provocative theory for yourself. What do your students think of it?

Answer to Question 2

• In its way, Greasy Lake is a force for change, despite its fall from a prior state of beauty. Caught trying to rape the girl in the blue car, the narrator is grateful to be alive and feels horror at the death of the bad older character whose body he meets in the slime. His growth has begun. When at the end of the story, two more girls pull into the parking lot, the subdued narrator and his friends are harmless. Cold sober and bone tired, they know they have had a lucky escape from consequences that might have been terrible. Also, the narrator knows, as the girls do not, that Al is dead, his body rotting in the lake. He wont turn upexcept perhaps in the most grisly way. It is this knowledge and the narrators new reverence for life that make him think he is going to cry.