Coming-of-Age Stories with Morals T. Coraghessan Boyles...

T. Coraghessan Boyles Greasy Lake and John Updikes A P have many similarities as well as differences. Both are coming-of-age stories that teach some sort of lesson to the protagonist at the end. â€Å"AP† is about a nineteen-year-old boy who stands up against his manager to impress a couple of girls who are dressed â€Å"immodestly†. â€Å"Greasy Lake† is about many nineteen years olds playing a prank on a couple of bad characters who turn out to show the teens what they can really do in return. Luckily, the narrator and Sammy both realize their deficiency after the situations with the other characters. In â€Å"AP† the narrator’s turning point in his life is when he finds the bikers body in the lake next to him. In â€Å"Greasy Lake† the†¦show more content†¦Both of these instances show the readers that the characters did not know what real life was until they were thrown into it by their own actions. Though there are many similarities, there are more obvious differences. The settings in each of the stories are very opposite. â€Å"AP† is set in a grocery store, while â€Å"Greasy Lake’ is set in nature somewhere by a lake past all the â€Å"housing developments and shopping malls†. This is most definitely not the only difference. Sammy is obviously not as immature as the narrator and his friends in â€Å"Greasy Lake†. Sammy works all summer while the other three boys look for adventure and mischief to get into. The worst Sammy did was quit his job for the wrong reasons, while the narrator’s worst was almost raping a girl, smoking marijuana, and almost killing a man. Through all of this the two protagonists’s learn a lesson. Sammy learned that quitting his job for three female strangers would not solve all of his problems; in fact, it would only lead him to discover more. He saw that the girls did not think as highly of his action as he did himself, and therefore led him to realize that he will be all alone in the world unless he changed his way of thinking. He was only thinking of â€Å"getting† the girls and trying to impress them, and not about doing what was right in the moment. The narrator in â€Å"AP† learned that he has to face his problem head on and not turn to other substances to take them away for him so he doesn’t have