Greasy Lake Essay
Greasy Lake Essay
In the short story Greasy Lake written by T.C. Boyle, the story is about three friends who believe they are “bad”. On a particular night they go out looking for trouble, and trouble is what they find. The tone of this story is serious, dark, and very graphic. This story is full of literary devices. Metaphors and similes come thick and fast on the shores of Greasy Lake, and Boyle never contents himself with one when he can offer two or three. The comparisons for their abundance, are neither aimless nor without purpose; they enable us to see the referent from strategic points of view. For this essay I will analyze the unnamed narrator whom is the protagonist in the story. The story opens up with the narrator describing the current times. There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. (Boyle 77) He and his friends, nineteen at the time, like to consider their selves bad characters. He then goes on to describe there wardrobe wearing torn up jackets, slouchy appearance with toothpicks in their mouth, sniffing glue and ether, and striking poses to show they didn’t give a shit about anything.(Boyle 77) As I began reading and took into context that Boyle was really trying to get his point across about them being bad. Maybe they were trying a little too hard to put on this appearance. The narrator describes his friends as two dangerous characters Digby and Jeff. Digby wore a gold earring, while attending college at Cornell that his father paid for and Jeff went to school but was thinking about dropping out to pursue another career as a painter/musician/head-shop proprietor. Obviously pretending to be people they weren’t while trying to fit in with the new fad. They wore dark shades morning and night and wherever they went. The narrator goes far and beyond to make sure the reader knows they were three bad characters. They whipped around in their parents station
In the short story Greasy Lake written by T.C. Boyle, the story is about three friends who believe they are “bad”. On a particular night they go out looking for trouble, and trouble is what they find. The tone of this story is serious, dark, and very graphic. This story is full of literary devices. Metaphors and similes come thick and fast on the shores of Greasy Lake, and Boyle never contents himself with one when he can offer two or three. The comparisons for their abundance, are neither aimless nor without purpose; they enable us to see the referent from strategic points of view. For this essay I will analyze the unnamed narrator whom is the protagonist in the story. The story opens up with the narrator describing the current times. There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. (Boyle 77) He and his friends, nineteen at the time, like to consider their selves bad characters. He then goes on to describe there wardrobe wearing torn up jackets, slouchy appearance with toothpicks in their mouth, sniffing glue and ether, and striking poses to show they didn’t give a shit about anything.(Boyle 77) As I began reading and took into context that Boyle was really trying to get his point across about them being bad. Maybe they were trying a little too hard to put on this appearance. The narrator describes his friends as two dangerous characters Digby and Jeff. Digby wore a gold earring, while attending college at Cornell that his father paid for and Jeff went to school but was thinking about dropping out to pursue another career as a painter/musician/head-shop proprietor. Obviously pretending to be people they weren’t while trying to fit in with the new fad. They wore dark shades morning and night and wherever they went. The narrator goes far and beyond to make sure the reader knows they were three bad characters. They whipped around in their parents station