Key Elements In Greasy Lake

Every good story revolves around key elements: Setting, Narrative point of view, Style, and Tone. In the story “Greasy Lake”, the setting primarily revolves around Greasy Lake, a parking lot next to a body of water really. However, its original and present condition plays an important part in shaping the story.
The story itself does not give a specified period of time. However, as one pays attention to the small details that are included throughout the story, you can get an overall feel that the timeline is set on the early 70’s. For example, there is a reference to a musical group called Toots & the Maytals, who were a reggae group that became popular in the early 1970s. One great indicator of the specific time period is that first sentence

of the story, which states: “There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went of style, when it was good to be bad” (365). This sentence beautifully sums up the changes that had occurred in the United States in the early 1970s. Counterculture had taken a firm hold of the youth, social norms and stable patterns of middle class life were rejected and the “bad boy” was born.
The setting of the story, Greasy Lake is shown to hold and portray very similar characteristics as the countercultural movement that was spanning across America.

We learn that in the lake was originally named “Wakan” by the Indians, “a reference to the clarity of its waters” (365). According to Wikipedia, Wakan means "powerful" or "sacred" in the Lakota language. It was an area that initially was beautiful, serene, and almost magical. It may have originally been a place where one could have come to reflect, dream and relax on the banks by the peaceful water. However, in the present day setting of the story, Greasy Lake is nothing more than “fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires” (365). It was the perfect place for mischief-makers to go hang out, hook up and cause trouble. It became the exact opposite of what Greasy Lake was like

originally.
The lake can be seen as a way for the writer, Boyle to convey to the readers how in that particular time period the youth had as a whole turned over to the “bad side”. Without having to go into great detail, Boyle is able to show us how the youth of that time, as it was entering adulthood threw itself into this new and unknown world by experimenting with everything and anything; sex, violence, drugs, etc. and in this particular story, Greasy Lake was the spot where all this was able to culminate.
It seems that Greasy Lake to the narrator was the one location where he and his friends could be as bad as they possibly could. “We were bad…we didn’t give a shit about anything. At night, we went up to Greasy Lake.” (365). Almost as if that was the one location where their “badness” could be irreplaceably confirmed, although after all the events that occurred that evening, it seems like their “badness”, at least for the narrator had been maxed out. At the end of the story, when a girl approached the boys and asked, “Hey, you want to party, you want to do some of these with me and Sarah?” these being “tablets in glassine wrappers” (372). If she had arrived at the beginning of the story and asked the very same question, the chance that they would have gladly accepted was pretty high, if not certain.
After nearly killing one man, almost raping a woman and swimming for hours within arm’s reach to a corpse it is almost as if the narrator is reborn, as if his eyes are magically opened.

As the narrator is lying in the murky water he starts to think about: “fog on the lake, insects chirring eerily and felt a tug of fear, felt the darkness opening up inside me like a set of jaws.” (371). You can see how the thought process made the narrator see and fear what he was becoming, possibly by being in the water next to the dead man he could see himself in that same position, dead somewhere if he did not change his ways. Later as you read further, the narrator states: “I pushed myself up from the mud and stepped out in to the open…everything was still. This was nature.” (371). It is almost like we as the readers get to see the rebirth of the narrator into a new, possible better individual. As is the murky water cleanses his soul and awakens a new being inside the

narrator.
Another way the writer is able to show the “rebirth” that the narrator goes through is by using time of day. The story initially starts off late at night, “It was 2:00 a.m.; the bars were closing. There was nothing to do but take a bottle of lemon-flavored gin up to Greasy Lake.” (366). Nighttime, darkness always tend to create the perfect setting for danger, evil and wrong doing. However, the story ends with a new day dawning: “By now the birds had begun to take over for the crickets, and dew lay slick on the leaves…the sun firing buds and opening blossoms.” (371). The writer uses the analogy of a new day as a great example of a new individual forming, one that sheds its past transgressions and errors and begins their life anew.
We all to some extent, some more that others go through a similar road in “discovery of self” and “coming of age”. We are very much like the 19 year old teenager, very much like that young boy, teeter on the fence between childhood innocence and adulthood. We make mistakes that become much bigger that we ever meant or anticipated to occur. And if we do not have a clear realization or make a conscious effort to change one day we continue on the path of self-destruction as we enter into the realm of adulthood. My only hope is that we all become the best part of ourselves that we can possibly be. That we shed our old sins and regrets and begin life better, wiser and stronger that we ever were before. May our own “Greasy Lake” moments shape us into better individuals and citizens of society.