Greasy Lake & An Ounce of Cure

In T. Coraghessan Boyle's (1985, p. 1) Greasy Lake, we are treated to the madness and mayhem of a group of deviant teenagers who are all described by the author as "dangerous characters." Indeed, the narrator and his two friends, Digby and Jeff will involve themselves in a beating, rape, and murder. In Alice Munro's (1968) An Ounce of Cure, we are provided with the story of a teenage girl's coming of age that shows how a young girl is often shaped more by what she thinks others desire of her than what she wishes to be. In both of these works, the overriding similarity is moral decay within society but each author interprets the implication of this decay on the individual differently.

In Boyle's (1985) Greasy Lake, we are told of three "bad" 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 "greasers" are achieved when they are "quick 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," (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, "He was probably the only person on the planet worse off than I�My car was wrecked; he was dead," (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, "I gave up my soul for dead and walked into the kitchen and decided to get drunk," (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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