How important to what happens in this story is Greasy Lake itself? Whatdetails about the lake and its shores strike you as particularly memorable (whether funny, disgusting, or both)?
What will be an ideal response?
- Students can have fun demonstrating how Greasy Lake is the perfect setting for Boyle’s story. Like the moral view of the narrator (at first), it is “fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires. There was a single ravaged island a hundred yards from shore, so stripped of vegetation it looked as if the air force had strafed it” (par. 2). The lake is full of “primordial ooze” and “the bad breath of decay” (par. 31). It also hides a waterlogged corpse. Once known for its clear water, the unlucky lake has fallen as far from its ideal state as the people who now frequent its shores have fallen from theirs. (If you teach the chapter on symbol, hark back to Greasy Lake once more.)
Candace Andrews of San Joaquin Delta College argues that, while on the surface “Greasy Lake” seems merely to recount the misadventures of a nineteen-year-old delinquent, a careful reading will show that much of the story retells the narrator’s experience in Vietnam—“It is a tale of a young man who has been to war and back.” For a writing assignment, she had her students list every reference or allusion to war, and she told them, “Then bring your ‘research’ together into some kind of coherent statement which supports the idea that the narrator is a Vietnam veteran.” We do not believe, ourselves, that Boyle’s several references to war necessarily require the narrator to be an ex-GI. He would have followed the war news and come to feel that the war was senseless violence—like the action out at Greasy Lake on a Saturday night. When he tells us (in paragraph 40) that he and Digby looked at the girl “like war veterans,” we take that to be a metaphor: he too feels a sort of battle fatigue. However, you may care to check out Professor Andrews’s provocative theory for yourself. What do your students think of it?
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Las clases de matematicas son ________________ (aburrido).
Completa con el superlativo del tipo –ísimo de los adjetivos indicados entre paréntesis. Ten en cuenta la concordancia de género y número.
There is a strong francophone influence in ______.
a. Texas b. Louisiana c. Florida
Which of the following statements about direct quotations and paraphrasing is accurate?
a. With paraphrasing, readers do not have to do the extra mental work required to shift from the writer’s voice to a different voice as they do when they read direct quotations. b. With direct quotations, readers do not have to do the extra mental work required to shift from the writer’s voice to a different voice as they do when they read paraphrases. c. Direct quotations and paraphrasing use the same voice, so readers have the same response. d. Readers prefer to read direct quotations over paraphrasing because the voice is similar to the writer’s.
Answer the following questions based on the videos from “Capítulo 1”.
Martin’s students are… a. independent. b. responsible. c. bored.