Setting- Greasy Lake

Greasy Lake


In the short story Greasy Lake by T. Coraghessan Boyle, the once beautiful lake provides a not so typical “baptism” to one of the main characters. The Greasy Lake also symbolizes the loss of innocence of the teenagers who visit the lake during “a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad.”(130)
The protagonist is a nineteen year old bad boy who goes up the Greasy Lake with his friends one night to “drink beer, smoke pot, howl at the stars, savor the incongruous full-throated roar of rock and roll against the primeval susurrus of frogs and crickets.”(130) Greasy Lake was not always a place for teenage partying, before the Indians had named the lake Wakan which was “a reference to the clarity of the water.” (130) After many years, and many careless people, the lake became “fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires.”(130) The protagonist goes to the lake with his friends and gets into a bad situation when a “bad greasy character” (132) starts to beat up the three boys. The protagonist gets consumed with his bad boy instinct and came at the man “like a kamikaze, mindless [and] raging”(132) and almost kills the man with a tire iron. When another man comes at the young boys, they all run in different directions, and the protagonist runs into the Greasy Lake waters.
The main character feels something strange in the water and realizes that it is a dead body under him in the lake. Thoughts rush in his mind, and the person who thought he was such a tough man admits to the audience that he was “a mere child, an infant”(134) which is showing a change in the young boy. When the protagonist attempts to get out of the lake, he stumbles back and “the muck [take] hold of [his] feet .. and suddenly, [he] was pitching face forward into the buoyant black mess.”(134) This symbolizes the lake engulfing this bad boy and making him think about what he has been doing. When the main character emerges from the muck, the “bad greasy”(130) characters leave and he feels a “rush of joy and vindication.”(135) He is about to leave the lake with his friends, when he sees two young girls who call them over and want to party with them. The young boys decline the offer, that hours before they would be more than willing to accept. This action by the boys show the change that this experience instilled in them.
The setting of Greasy Lake allows the main character come to the realization that is it not good to be bad. Greasy Lake was once a place that these boys did all the wrong things, but after their lives are threatened, the main character goes through an unusual baptism-like situation. When he leaves Greasy Lake with his newfound perspective, he sees “a sheen of sun on the lake”(137) which shows that people who have lost their innocence can gain it back.