Greasy Lake & An Ounce of Cure

In BoyleÆs (1985) Greasy Lake, we are told of three ôbadö boys who are friends and wish to get to Greasy Lake, a Mecca for decadent teens. There are no ambitions among this group to achieve or to engage in the norms and values endorsed by mainstream society. The only goals of the three ôgreasersö are achieved when they are ôquick with a sneer, able to manage a Ford with lousy shocks over a rutted and gutted blacktop road at eighty-five while rolling a joint as compact as a Tootsie Roll Pop stick,ö (Boyle, 1985, p. 2). The teenage narrator and his friends will come of age through their encounters with a really bad character, Bobby. Before the night is through, a woman is raped, Bobby is hit over the head with a tire iron, and a biker i

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reveals himself to be self-interested and pretentious in his views of himself. He compares losing his keys to a major action in Vietnam. He permits his friends to prevent him from aiding the girls in the Mustang looking for their friend. The narrator actually compares the loss of life to his smashed car, ôHe was probably the only person on the planet worse off than IàMy car was wrecked; he was dead,ö (Boyle, 1985, p. 9). The narrator in An Ounce of Cure, is also a moral coward in many ways. She is terrified of the opinions of others, particularly with her appearance. She is shocked boys seem to pay her attention even though her home permanent turned out bad and she looks just like her and nobody else. Because of this, like the friends in Greasy Lake resort to moral cowardice and silence to escape their responsibilities, so the narrator in An Ounce of Cure turns to alcohol as a coping mechanism for the emotions and feelings of her youth with which she cannot deal, ôI gave up my soul for dead and walked into the kitchen and decided to get drunk,ö (Munro, 1968, p. 156). The tone of Greasy Lake is one of cowardice and lack of moral action. The narrator and his friends are unable to respond to the woman and her friend in th
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1339
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)