Irony In Greasy Lake

T. C. Boyle’s “Greasy Lake” tells the story of a teenage boy who drives his mother’s Bel Air to Greasy Lake with his friends, Jeff and Digby, coming across a motorcycle and a car that they think belongs to their friend, Tony. Their descent into anarchy begins when a man that is not Tony jumps out of the car and starts fighting, winning with ease, until the protagonist knocks him out with a tire iron and believes that he is dead. The boys, acting solely on primal urges, come close to raping the man’s girlfriend but flee when another car pulls into the lot. The protagonist ends up in the lake, where the discovery of corpse in the water quickly sobers him. After hearing the dead man wake up and destroy their car, the boys head back and encounter …show more content…
It seems as though he isn’t really a bad person, but in a time when “courtesy and winning ways went out of style” (77), he is under a lot of pressure to come across as though he is. Prior to the events of the night, the protagonist goes to great efforts to come across as a bad character, even as far as keeping a tire iron under the driver’s seat, because “bad characters always keep tire irons under the driver’s seat” (78). In the morning, however, when the girl looking for Al tells the boys that they “look like some pretty bad characters” (81), their reactions are not positive and they turn her down when she asks them to party with her and her friend. Several references to the military exemplify the weight of this struggle. When the protagonist strikes the man with the tire iron, coming at him “like a kamikaze” (79), when he shoots away from the corpse “like a torpedo” (80), and in the morning, when the boys meet the girl looking for Al, he grips the steering wheel “like the ejection lever of a flaming jet” (81) and they look at her “like war veterans” (81). Interestingly, the narrator describes himself as a kamikaze and a torpedo, both of which carry very negative connotations, following instances of wrongdoing on his behalf, but puts himself in the position of a soldier in the morning. It seems as though he is trying to justify his actions - he was young and stupid, he was just doing what had to be …show more content…
The tension rises when the boys attempt to rape the man’s girlfriend, and another car pulls into the lot, causing them to run away. The climax occurs when the narrator stumbles upon the corpse in the lake, causing him to realize that he is “a mere child, an infant” (79) and not quite the adult he thought he was. The protagonists finds some maturity, and seems to abandon his pursuit of this bad image when he and his friends decline the girl’s offer of pills and