Imagery In Greasy Lake

Set in the late 1960’s, “Greasy Lake,” written by T. Coraghessan Boyle, depicts an eventful summer night of a boy and his two friends at a desolated, dank location called Greasy Lake. Boyle’s use of parallelism and informal diction of imagery enhanced the events and setting of the story, therefore, created an atmosphere of endangerment and rebelliousness. The combination of the use of language, bad teenagers, reckless decisions, and a desolated lake created some forms of the fictional literary art of symbolism. The story, “Greasy Lake,” written by T. Coraghessan Boyle, uses diverse styles of language to evoke a visionary setting and forms of symbolism, in which, created a visionary tale.

Boyle’s use of style is the basis of the story, because

it sets realistic description to the events taken place, visualization of the setting, and the atmosphere. Foremost, the use of parallelism, in order, to convey the reader to a realistic mindset of a teenager through the narration of an adult narrator. “Understood, and stumbled … my mind yanked in six different directions ( I was nineteen, a mere child … I’d struck down one greasy character and blundered into the waterlogged carcass of a second), thinking, The keys, the keys, why did I have to go and lose the keys.” (Boyle, 430) As a teenage reader, the use of parallelism from the narrator and informal diction, depicted a quite realistic reaction of how a teenager would react in a similar situation. Along with these uses of styles in the story, the author used much of imagery to create amazingly visual setting and events.