T. Coraghessan Boyle's Greasy Lake

T. Coraghessan Boyle’s short story, “Greasy Lake,” is a work of fiction that is meant to display the absurdities of the American teenage experience. Published in 1985, Boyle is quick to contextualize the work within an 80s teenager’s frame of reference; he opens the story with a lyric from a Bruce Springsteen song, “Sprit of the Night,” which acts as Boyle’s first symbol in the story, a tribute to the teenagers of the decade in which the story is published. But, from the content, it can be surmised that the story takes place near the time of the Vietnam War, so Boyle’s appeal to 80s rock culture makes the work symbolic, meant to encapsulate the teenage male spirit. Through a series of symbols, Boyle’s story both depicts and satirizes the teenage American male ethos. Boyle’s language often contains metaphors that entrench the reader deeper in the …show more content…
When the boys have reconvened at the destroyed car, two young women arrive, presumably calling the corpse’s name, Al. When asked about Al’s whereabouts, the narrator and his friends, fearful of being associated with their most recent assault, reply in the negative. The most telling moment of the story, however, comes when one of the young women, drunk, offers the boys some drugs: “‘Hey you guys look like some pretty bad characters—been fightin’ huh?...you want to party, you want to do some of these with me and Sarah?’…I thought I was going to cry” (11). The marks of their recent fighting do not give their true impression—of an assault, potential murder, and attempted rape. Instead the girl associates them with frivolous excitement, completely amiss that Al floats dead in Greasy Lake. The boys’ symbolic transition out of childhood is most poignant in the final scene, when they turn down the offer for drugs, and drive away as the “girl is still standing there, watching [the boys], her shoulders slumped, hand outstretched”