Greasy Lake, Essay Example

Coraghessan Boyle’s short story, Greasy Lake, has attained something of a cult status since its 1985 publication. It is alternately viewed as an allegory to the Vietnam war and as a violent and gritty coming-of-age for disenfranchised, lost youth.

The title clearly conveys the reality Boyle wishes to present, for there is nothing anywhere in the setting of the story that is not bleak, desolate, and filthy. The lake itself is “fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires” (Ford 555). The rest of the setting serves only to provide an equally dismal foreground to this stage piece, for the entire story takes place in a nightmare vision of the menacing lot by the lake and the festering woods around it. With obvious intent, Boyle’s scene is limited in size and a place notorious for foulness, both in the decay of nature and in the actions of those drawn to the lake.

As unforgiving as Boyle is with his landscape, so too does he deviate from classic form and tell a story with no single sympathetic character in it. The three main protagonists are the narrator, Jeff, and Digby. They are introduced immediately, and in no uncertain terms, as uncaring, crude, and rebellious. They go to the lake, in fact, only because they have exhausted their other, standard routes of vandalism and aimlessness. Boyle points up the inevitability of the dank and menacing destination in two short lines: “It was 2:00 a.m.; the bars were closing. There was nothing to do but take a bottle of lemon-flavored gin up to Greasy Lake” (Ford 556).

In this manner as well Boyle conveys a further sense of an ugly destiny at play. The three are going to the lake with no specific purpose of any kind, yet the restlessness and the emptiness within the characters suggests that they are, in essence, trouble waiting to happen themselves.

This occurs swiftly when a man in a car, apparently engaged in sex with a girl inside, is mistaken by the three for a friend. As with the other characters introduced in this brief tableau, the man and the girl exist as further ‘shadows’, similar to the protagonists in that they are lost, angry, and explosive. The three friends interrupt the man and the girl;  an intensely violent battle begins and the narrator succeeds is striking the man down, possibly killing him. In a disturbing narrative sequence the three then attempt to rape the girl and Boyle, through his narrator, makes no apologies for it. They are described as mindless and incensed by the blood they have themselves spilled.

The boys are themselves interrupted and the narrator makes a dark escape into the filth of the lake. Other walk-on characters appear, notably two nameless fraternity boys who destroy the narrator’s car and permit Boyle to carry out his agenda in this regard, for no one at the lake exhibits anything like humanity or decency. The only moments of relief or calm occur because death is averted or a set of car keys is spotted on the ground, and the story ends with further wretchedness in the form of two girls who offer the protagonists drugs.

The characterizations in Greasy Lake are largely one-dimensional, and mercilessly so. If it was not the author’s intent to create an allegory to Vietnam or anything else, his story is then a broadly-sketched parable waiting for a cause. His people are intentionally drawn as repulsive and with no redeeming qualities, and this blatant lack of any real characterization renders the story a not altogether successful portrait of youthful despair and rage.

Works Cited

Ford, Richard. The Granta Book of The American Short Story. London, UK: Granta Books, 1998. Print.