An Example to be imitated at greater length, i.e. one full page.
The question: What does Bad mean in “Greasy Lake”?
Your thesis in response to the question: Bad’s meaning develops as the story is told.
Underline your thesis just like it is here, and set it above your response.
Right at the outset, the narrator claims that back in the day “it was good to be
bad,” which seems to mean something like “cool.” Then he lists some behavior of bad
people, meaning him and his friends. “We drank gin and grape juice, Tango,
Thunderbird, and Bali Hai…We were bad.” Then he gives the essence of the term:
“[W]e struck elaborate poses to show that we didn’t give a shit about anything.” In
short, bad in this sense is all about posing. It is self-regarding and inauthentic.
The next time we see bad it modifies “greasy character,” and this guy is violent,
a real ass-kicker who takes on three guys who disturbed him when he was getting it on
with his “fox.” The greasy character is not a poser, he’s a man of action as the narrator
says. He is probably how they imagine themselves before that night.
But the most interesting and problematic uses of bad come after the narrator
uses a tire iron to knock out the bad guy and the three young men are about to rape
“the fox.” The narrator says, “We were on her…panting, wheezing, tearing at her
clothes, grabbing for flesh. We were bad characters….” He has beat a man unconscious
and all three are in the first moments of sexual assault, of a gang rape. This is primal
bad, crossing over the line, outside of civilization bad, and experiencing it is probably
the defining moment of the story. The boys are interrupted, forced to abandon the
rape, but for a time they are genuinely bad and no one is more surprised at their
“badness” than the posers themselves. It’s pretty clear by the end of the story, when
they turn down a chance to party with two women, when they want to just go home,
that they don’t want any part of the real thing.
One page single spaced getting quickly to the point incorporating quotes and other
evidence from the text.
Grading: Good—OK—No
Good means you answer the prompt concisely in a well-formed thesis formatted as
above AND you develop that thesis with support from the text. That support will
include properly incorporated quotes. Paragraphing is necessary; this is a short paper.
Your writing is free of usage errors
OK means you have a thesis that is properly formatted but it is not well-formed. The
problem might be slack imprecise language or half-baked thinking. For example, the
thesis above is Good. But “bad means how they behave in the story” is crabbed and
imprecise. Mediocre. OK also means the thesis is not sufficiently developed and the
prose is unstructured. There may also be some usage/grammar errors.
No means the work is not even mediocre. Errors drag it further down, poor work with
quotes.
Questions for upcoming panels
1
2 Feb 6 What is (or what are) the revelation(s) in this story?
3 Feb 11 Does the narrator explicitly tell or merely suggest what is happening?
4 Feb 25 What do Rosewater and Billy have in common?
5 Feb 27 What are three most important teachings of the Tralfamadorians?
6 Mar 6 In what sense is desire a part of the monk’s story?
Round Two: more involved but keep to one page of essential information.
1 Mar. 11 In what sense is asceticism part of the musician’s tale.
2 Mar. 25 Is the citizen known or unknown?
3 Apr. 15 How does color work in “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock?”
4 Apr. 17 In what sense is Prospero responsible for his own exile?
5 Apr. 24 Whose idea is it to murder Duncan? Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, or both?
6 Apr. 27 What are three clear differences between Mac in act one and act five?
2