“The Lie” by Coraghessan Boyle--Rest in Pieces

When I was in the process of reading this short story by Coraghessan, I felt that I was in a moment living, absently, the life of Lonnie. Coraghessan manages to describe every scene and emotion in few but precise words. “…hardened as they climbed from my shoetops to my face, where they rested like two balls of granite” (Coraghessan). The expression “balls of granite” fully describe the look of Clover, staring heavily into Lonnie’s eyes. Personally, I liked the author’s descriptions due to the fact that he limited himself to the usage of few words, keeping the reader always focused due to the rapid change of events.

Passing on to my real interpretation of the text I am obliged to say that this story took me by surprise. At first, as I read along, I thought to myself that this was a very simple short story where its plot was easily deciphered. Lonnie was just a average man exhausted from his monotonous work, having as a consequence he inventing lies of any kind to skip work: “If I could make it to the weekend, I was sure that by Monday, Monday at the latest, whatever was wrong with me, this feeling of anger, hopelessness, turmoil, whatever it was, would be gone” (Coraghessan). As a reader I new from the instant that Lonnie had invented to skip work that his only child had died, that he was eventually going to get caught somehow by his wife or boss (Radko); however, the end suddenly hit me, I was never expecting it, I thought of the end just being a bad dream or just that the story continues, but I never though of this ending which so powerfully enjambed in the story an intricate meaning.

“And I wasn’t about to answer her because the baby was dead and she was dead, too. Radko was dead, Jeannie the secretary whose last name I didn’t even know, and Joel Chinowski, and all the rest of them. Very slowly, button by button, I did up my shirt. Then I set my empty beer bottle down on the counter as carefully as if it were full to the lip and went on out the door and into the night, looking for somebody I could tell all about it.”

This paragraph is the ending to the short story “The Lie”. Notice how the author wrote the word was (in the first line before dead) in a cursive from trying to make it stand out. This ending made it seem as if Lonnie was completely crazy, or even autistic. The fact that Lonnie would eventually accept that his living daughter is dead wouldn’t of impacted me this way since a lay told many times could come true; however, in the ending the speaker tells the reader that every single character that appeared in this story (except for the women in the bar) “was” dead. What is the author exactly telling the reader here? This ending completely lost me, I really don’t know what the author wanted the reader to receive from this ending. The first line in the ending of this short story is Lonnie directly telling he reader that he wasn’t going to answer what Clover had told him due to the fact that everybody around him was dead. Then, in the last line he, still talking to the reader, says that he is going out to tell this story to another person. Both of these lines could also suggest that the author portrayed himself as Lonnie, and made up this story to entertain, or even play with the reader. The fact that Lonnie mentions him going to look for another person to tell this story to made me think about the above conclusion. Maybe, just like in The Crying of Lot 49, the author plays with the reader by first catching his attention then make the reader look for a meaning to the story to find that there was no meaning, that the author just played with the naïve fellows that happened to get interested in their works.

In this short story, Coraghessan may be mocking the unsatisfied workers of the world who invent ridiculous and rather dangerous excuses to not attend work: “The baby’s dead,” I said. “She died.” And then, in my grief, I broke the connection” Coraghessan). What kind of a sick man would invent that his daughter is DEAD to skip work? To go to such extreme where your excuses have ran out, forcing you to invent something such as the death of someone you allegedly love is just inhumane. My dad has always said to me that the day he doesn’t want to stand up from his bed to go to work, that day he will be dead man.

“…all I felt was regret and the cold drop of doom” (Coraghessan). This specific sentence caught my attention because it told the reader what was going to happen, Lonnie was going to get caught; however, Lonnie knew from then on that he was “doomed”, that he had just lost everything in his life for skipping a couple of days at work.