Challenges And Struggles In Coraghessan Boyle's Greasy Lake

In Coraghessan Boyle “Greasy Lake” the narrator goes through some wild adventures. He considers himself as a tough guy. Not knowing the obstacles he’s about to take will change the way he thinks of himself. In the story three teenage boys who think as themselves as bad boys, make a number of mistakes and at the end suffer the consequences.

The narrator in Greasy Lake considers himself and his friends to be “bad” boys. He says that they wear leather jackets with ripped jeans and walk around with a toothpick in their mouths. He talks about how his friends were all dangerous characters. “Digby wore a gold star in his right ear and allowed his father to pay his college intuition; Jeff was thinking of quitting school to become a painter or musician” (Boyle pg. 294) The narrator has an immature personality, he wants to be known as being a bad boy, a tough guy but deep down he knows he’s not that at all.

This story is about three 19-year-old teenagers looking for adventure late one night. They drive up to a place where they would hang out called Greasy Lake which used to be a nice blue lake and now it’s dirty filled with dump and broken glass bottles. But they go there hoping to find some excitement before they go home. When they arrive to the lake, the narrator loses his keys, gets in a fight with "a bad greasy character," and almost killed him and then they were close to raping his girlfriend. When another car pulls up to the lake to see what was happening the boys run. The narrator heads for the lake; suddenly he feels something mushy and discovers a corpse.

Throughout the night he has had some crazy experiences. In one short evening, he had been beaten, he hit someone with a time iron, he almost raped a women. And then he find...

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...oys as well as himself. The narrator decides to go up to greasy lake to have some fun with his friends, little did they know they were about to see what a bad boy really does. During his adventure up to greasy Lake He see a greasy character which to him is a really bad character. The narrator and his friends start to provoke this character, which led to some bad consequences. All in one day the narrator known as Al, has been beaten and attempted to rape the girlfriend of the greasy character but what he later discovered, would make him change the ways he think of himself. What he has encountered that day made him realize that he is not a bad boy after all. At the beginning of the story that’s what he consider himself as but at the end once he has experience all these unfortunate events he came to a realization that he’s not at all a bad boy as he thought he was.