Helping Others Essay

and regrouping have fully and violently crashed back into the reality of their horrid actions. The girls ask the three now bad characters if they want to party and before the narrator can respond Digby says “No thanks, he said leaning over me some other time” (Boyle 9). Just like that they all come full circle and the ramifications of their actions have set in and the narrator reverts back into a child with a new view on his rebellious…

In “Greasy Lake”, by T. Coraghessan Boyle, a group of “bad characters” get into some trouble after cruising out at night. Dominick Grace asserts that “The youths in the story are clearly rebels without much cause and without much real need for rebellion. They are clearly not the genuinely bad characters they think they are.” (Grace 2). Throughout the story they try to show that they don’t care about anything through what they wear and through their actions, but that quickly changes after they…

T.C. Boyle’s Greasy Lake T.C. Boyle’s Greasy Lake is a short fiction that focuses on three young men in the 1960s. A time when the narrator says, it was good to be bad, when young people cultivated decadence like a taste. The three young privileged men take a night out on the town at Greasy Lake, when they can drink, smoke, listen to music, and howl at the moon. This story can be seen as a representation of Boyle’s teenage years as he refers to himself as a sort of pampered punk. As described…

Greasy Lake was a short story written by T.C. Boyle with a deeper meaning in it rather than just being a good read. The short story shows an idea of coming of age. Coming of age means to mature through events and have a different mindset. The characters go from bad boys to wanting to be good. This is due to the behavior changes of the narrator and his friends before the night, through the night, and in the morning. In the beginning of Greasy Lake, the 3 guys, Digby, Jeff, and the narrator had…

The 1950’s was a period were being rebellious and outspoken was popular for young adults. The “Greaser” was the most popular and rebellious title a young adult could have during the those times. A “Greaser” is well known by wearing a leather jacket, plain white t-shirt, tight blue jeans, and a greased up hairstyle. In Tom Coraghessan Boyle’s story “Greasy Lake”, he tells us the story of three 19 year olds trying to spend a summer night living a “Greaser” lifestyle and getting into any trouble…

T.C. Boyle’s “Greasy Lake” employs excellent use of setting to contextualize the events of the narrative. The characters, Digby, Jeff, and the narrator are teens in the peak of rebellion, three thrill seekers looking to break up the monotony of their lives with their misadventures at the “Greasy Lake”, a refuse filled pond that is a hub of drug use and crime. On one such excursion, the group encounters a man who typifies what they believe themselves to be, a “Bad greasy character”. Their…

The Introduction and the first chapter of the Riis’s book “How the Other Lives”, seem to vividly depict drastic changes in New York City’s demographic structure, which happened during the vast immigration wave of 1880’s. His photograph projections intrigued and shocked the opulent class, since it was not aware of the struggles of those underneath. Riis’s life’s work has only gained in relevance as the time was passing, since overcrowded tenements persisted in modified forms and shapes to this…

Throughout the stories of “The Monkey” by Stephen King and Dracula by Bram Stoker it is seen how there is an element of the uncanny at work. As each of these narratives is read, what we have become familiarized with as human beings becomes foreign and unsettling to us. What we thought we understood has been changed and has now become frightening. To better understand the uncanny I will first summarize how Sigmund Freud describes it, then I will argue that there is an element of the uncanny in…

Supernatural, a manifestation or event that attributes to some force beyond scientific and logical understanding. For many, these events involve ghosts, a haunted object and/or a place, just like the events that take place in “The Judge’s House,” by Bram Stoker. The main character, Malcolm Malcolmson is a hardworking young man who just wanted a quiet place to study for an upcoming exam that would isolate him from distractions. Malcolm goes on a search for a quiet place, and then comes across the…

Mystery brings an author like Oscar Wilde to fame; who writes in themes such as, “The world's a stage, but the play is badly cast,” a spin off from Hamlet, and uses metaphors for life such as, “days break in beauty and set in storm,” found in “The Sphinx Without a Secret and Lord Savile’s Crime”. His prose, setting, characters, and themes, show his style of writing when comparing closely to each of the short story works. Oscar Wilde lived and published many of his works late into the 1800’s.…