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It was then that they turned to the car. I heard a door slam, a curse, and then the sound of headlights shattering—almost a good-natured sound, celebratory, like corks popping from the necks of bottles. This was succeeded by the dull booming of the fenders, metal on metal, and then the icy crash of the windshield. I inched forward, elbows and knees, my belly pressed to the muck, thinking of guerrillas and commandos and The Naked and the Dead. I parted the weeds and squinted the length of the parking lot.
These lines, which occur when Bobbie begins to smash the narrator’s mother’s car, offer good examples of how allusion enriches story. The narrator alludes first to a common experience: opening champagne to celebrate an event. The pleasant sound is out of place, juxtaposed with curses and destruction, and adds a surreal detail to the scene.
Then the narrator describes how he crawls by stacking three allusions. The first allusion is to covert guerilla warfare. The second is to specially trained stealth soldiers. These allusions are to real-world situations, while the third allusion refers to a 1948 Normal Mailer novel or to the 1958 film adaptation. The novel follows a platoon of Americans in the Pacific Theater of World War II; the soldiers endure mortar fire while in foxholes on a beach. All three allusions compare what the narrator experiences to combat.
He is not a soldier in danger of dying, but with the corpse of the drowned man behind him and the sight of Bobbie wielding the tire iron in front of him, the narrator feels some kinship with soldiers at war. When the narrator gets back to the car, he uses another military allusion, comparing himself to “the sole survivor of an air blitz.” These allusions underscore how dire the night’s events feel to him.
The first mistake, the one that opened the whole floodgate, was losing my grip on the keys. In the excitement, leaping from the car with the gin in one hand and a roach clip in the other, I spilled them in the grass—in the dark, rank, mysterious nighttime grass of Greasy Lake. This was a tactical error, as damaging and irreversible in its way as Westmoreland’s decision to dig in at Khe Sanh. I felt it like a jab of intuition, and I stopped there by the door, peering vaguely into the night that puddled up round my feet.
These lines narrate the story’s inciting incident and use juxtaposition to contrast two actions: the narrator’s dropping his keys and a general’s decision, during the Vietnam conflict, to defend a strategic base in a months-long siege that cost many lives and much necessary matériel. Clearly, these two events differ in significance and gravity. One affects just a few young men on just one night, and the other affected many people over months, even years. One initiates a fistfight, the other protracts a war.
By juxtaposing these events, Boyle points up the life-changing significance for the narrator of the events at Greasy Lake. He senses the change coming, feeling it as a “jab of intuition.” And the “tactical error,” he knows, is unforced. He moves too quickly, without thinking of potential consequences and with his hands juggling too many things. While the results of the juxtaposed events are of different orders of magnitude, both, in the narrator’s opinion, arise from poor judgment.
When the eastern half of the sky went from black to cobalt and the trees began to separate themselves from the shadows, I pushed myself up from the mud and stepped out into the open. By now the birds had begun to take over for the crickets, and dew lay slick on the leaves. There was a smell in the air, raw and sweet at the same time, the smell of the sun firing buds and opening blossoms. I contemplated the car. It lay there like a wreck along the highway, like a steel sculpture left over from a vanished civilization. Everything was still. This was nature.
These lines occur at dawn during the story’s falling action. They bookend the first description of the lake, in the story’s second paragraph, and end with the same sentence: “This was nature.” While the first description describes the lake as polluted, even “ravaged,” and focuses on what people do there, the second focuses on nature’s regenerative abilities.
The lake had been named, in the distant past, for its clear waters but now is “fetid and murky.” Yet this description suggests that renewal is possible, even inevitable. The lake’s smell is not “festering,” as in the first description, but “raw and sweet,” and growth begins anew. In this setting, the smashed car strikes the narrator as evidence of a “vanished civilization” in a setting that nature has taken back from people. The coming of dawn and the renewal of growth are both symbols for what’s next for the narrator as well. He has discovered, during the night, truths about himself and about life, and now he must live with these truths in a world he understands in a new and clearer way.
I put the car in gear and it inched forward with a groan, shaking off pellets of glass like an old dog shedding water after a bath, heaving over the ruts on its worn springs, creeping toward the highway. There was a sheen of sun on the lake. I looked back. The girl was still standing there, watching us, her shoulders slumped, hand outstretched.
The story’s final paragraph includes some of the figurative language that characterizes the entire story. The narrator and his friends have just tried to avoid Al’s friends, looking at one of them “like zombies, like war veterans, life deaf-and-dumb pencil peddlers,” three similes that convey their stunned exhaustion after the hours of fear and destruction by the lake. They want so badly to leave the lake that the narrator’s hands hang on to the steering wheel as if it’s the “ejection lever of a flaming jet.”
The description of the car in these final lines is sympathetic, almost comforting. The car is personified; like a person who has taken a beating, it moves “with a groan” and must heave itself and creep along—but it’s still moving. The car is also compared, using a simile, to a dog shaking itself after a bath. It sheds the shattered bits of glass as it moves across the rutted parking lot, leaving behind some of the evidence of the trauma the narrator endured during the night. The girls arrive in a sought-after muscle car with a rumbling engine, but it’s the mother’s old Chevy that, like a faithful dog, accompanies the narrator and his friends home.
