Greasy Lake Summary

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T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “Greasy Lake” is a timeless tale that will leave you on the edge of your seat if it was a movie, but in this case this short story will have your eyes glued to the page. We will discover Boyle’s arrangement of incidents in this story 's as he explains the plot from the beginning that talks about “ There was a time “ which clearly states that this story was a flashback of his pass. This story takes place in 1985 when the narrator who is also Boyle was nineteen year old. This is a story of revelation. Walker states “The passage of the protagonist from water to land, and from night to morning, parallels his passage from ignorance to knowledge, from chaos to order, from naiveté to understanding. (Qtd Walker 247-255)“The …show more content…

The boys immediately take off in different directions in the forest. The narrator runs straight into the greasy lake to hide. He hears voice talking about them; he hears the guy’s saying they were going to beat him and his friends up and soon as they find them. So then he began to go further into the lake which is very muddy, filled with all kinds of insects flying around, tall weeds, with frogs, snakes and turtles in the lake and who knows what else. As he is in the lake, he began to think about the terrible things that he and his friend had done. He begins to think how he had just killed a man and how him and his friends had tried to attempt rapping a girl. As he is walking in the lake he touches a dead body and gets freaked out even more and began to yell. Then the girl hears him and scream there they are and began to throw rocks into the lake trying to hit the narrator. He then hears the voice of Bobby who bought him relief and sorrow at the same time. He felt relief because he discovers that the Bobby is not dead and sorrow because the Bobby was alive and wanted to kill him and his friends. Bobby and his friends decided to vandalize the boys car by busting the windshield, knocking out the headlight, hitting the side of the car with a sledge hammer and throwing trash in the car through the broken windshield. Meanwhile the narrator is in the lake thinking about how foolish him and his friends were being on that night. He began to think about jail cells, police, court and his mom car and how was he going to explain everything to the cops and his family. . “Then he began to think again but this time he thinks about the dead man saying to himself “ He was probably the only person on the planet worst off than I was”(Boyle 172). The narrator begins to realize that many he does want to be a bad guy after all

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