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"A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" by Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez’s well-known short story intertwines magical realism and everyday life to examine how difficult it can be for people mired in daily struggles to look up and see what is wondrous and wonderful. Whoever or whatever the old man with wings is, the story’s characters regard him as a puzzle, as a disappointment, as an income-generating novelty, and even as a nuisance until he leaves as suddenly as he arrived. At that point, one character realizes that she is sorry he’s gone. Like the narrator of “Greasy Lake,” she grasps the significance of something she’d taken for granted only after it’s gone.
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor
In Flannery O’Connor’s gripping Southern Gothic story, a family on a road trip runs afoul of a dangerous escaped criminal known as “the Misfit.” The story’s protagonist, the grandmother, tries to avoid the trip and then, forced to go, manipulates her son to a rural road to see an old plantation. A car accident leaves them vulnerable to the Misfit and his associates, and during the violent aftermath of the accident, the grandmother has a realization about the responsibility people have for each other. The story’s violence takes the grandmother’s life; she doesn’t survive to put her epiphany to use, unlike the narrator of “Greasy Lake,” who carries what he learns into adulthood.
"Marigolds" by Eugenia Collier
Eugenia Collier’s framed story features a narrator who is inspired by the memory of brightly colored marigolds to think back to her childhood and recall a moment of realization that ushered her from the innocence of childhood into the understanding of adult realities. Growing up in a poor neighborhood during a time of rampant discrimination against Black people, the narrator comes to understand an elderly neighbor’s desire to create beauty in the midst of ugliness. As do the epiphanies of the narrator in “Greasy Lake,” this realization colors the rest of Collier’s narrator’s life and reframes her understanding of burdens most adults carry.
"The Swimmer" by John Cheever
The protagonist of this story, Neddy, decides to take an interesting route home after a poolside visit with friends: he will walk from swimming pool to swimming pool, most private but also a public pool, and swim across each one. Time passes in an oddly quick and worrisome way as he moves from pool to pool. At each pool, Neddy discovers hidden details about his suburban neighbors’ lives and begins to realize that something is terribly wrong in his life as well. His worldview changes as the false fronts people present to each other fall away and he sees them more accurately. Similarly, the narrator of “Greasy Lake” is forced, by what he learns during the story, to reassess his opinions of himself and the two buddies whose rebelliously cool stances he admired before the encounter with Bobbie and the fox.
"The Dead" by James Joyce
This story in James Joyce’s collection Dubliners features a protagonist whose socially prescribed roles among friends, family, and even household servants leave him dissatisfied and a touch resentful. He plays his roles, not perfectly but dutifully, but in a moment of honest realization admits that he’s deeply unhappy as he contemplates his life and considers how brief any life is. The narrator of “Greasy Lake,” too, faces the idea that life is brief and that he, like the drowned man, is painfully subject to mortality.
