Character Analysis Of Greasy Lake

T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of Greasy Lake. Boyle was born in 1948 in Peekskill, New York, son of Irish immigrants. Mr. Boyle’s character, which is the narrator, corresponds to who he was during his young years. He was a privileged college kid as he recalls, “as a sort of pampered punk”. He later on became a high school teacher for quite some years, while he studied in the University of Iowa processing stories for his PH.D. He has recently published four novels and was quickly noticed due to the vast reflection of his idiosyncratic ideas. The unnamed character/narrator in Greasy Lake is Boyle himself looking back on his youth. Boyle and his two friends Digby and Jess play out to be bad characters, but only to miss their life in the suburbs

Throughout the story “Greasy Lake” the three young men are looking for a sense of rush to make them feel like the atrocious characters they desperately want to be. They just finished their first year of college, and the young men are restless to begin an adventure. It was on the third night of the summer that they spent cruising looking for trouble, eventually causing them to head out to Greasy Lake. The story “Greasy Lake” shows why people are common to hang around there by stating, “we went up to the lake because everyone went there, because we wanted to snuff the rich sent of possibility on the breeze, watch a girl take off her clothes and plunge into the festering murk, drink beer, smoke pot, howl at the stars, savor the incongruous full-throated roar of rock and roll against the primeval susurrus of frogs and crickets” (Boyle, 129). The narrator explains the reason why every bad character goes to Greasy Lake. The three young men don’t just want to just be bad characters, but they want to look the part. In the story “Greasy Lake” the author clearly allows the reader to know who they look up to. “We read Andre Gide and struck elaborate poses to show that we didn’t give a shit about anything” (Boyle, 129). This explains how they idolize the author Andre Gide, who shares his own experiences as a teenager in the 1950s. This sums up his actions and how he is trying to be seen as bad by pointing out he’s nineteen and bad to get

The story reveals how the narrator describes himself and his friends. In the story “Greasy Lake” the narrator says, “We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine” (Boyle, 129). This explains the characters they portray to be but in reality are not due to the correction he gives in the end. While they are still playing out as bad characters they find themselves in a troubled situation that was supposed to be a joke. They flash the headlight to a car who they think is Tony’s. They notice immediately that it is not their friend’s car and end up picking a fight with a guy who was with his girlfriend. They narrator and his friends are taking a beating and the narrator decides to get a tire iron and smacks the man knocking him out cold on the floor. In the story “Greasy Lake” explains how they felt, “Motherfucker’, he spat, over and over, and I was aware in that instant that all four of us- Digby, Jeff, and myself included- were chanting ‘motherfucker, motherfucker, ‘as if it were a battle cry” (Boyle, 131). This describes how intimidating they feel by leaving the man in the floor but the narrator explains how terrified he actually was to do that. The girlfriend starts bashing at them and trying to hit them with