Greasy Lake Literary Elements

Short story

The action in the short story takes place in the state of New York yet the exact location and date when the action takes place remains unknown.

The narrator of the story is also the main character, a young man of eighteen looking for something exciting to do with their lives. Thus, he narrates the short story from a first person subjective point of view.

The tone used in the story is violent, chaotic and vulgar.

The impression left in the story is the idea that there are no good characters in the story and in the city where the main character lives. Instead, everyone is bad and always ready to get involved in a deviant behavior.

The major conflict is an internal one and is the result of the main character’s desire to be seen as being bad and the knowledge that he is anything but that. The conflict remains largely unresolved as the narrator realizes that he is not a bad person but at the same time lets it be understood that he still desires to be seen as a dangerous person.

The story reaches its climax when the narrator stumbles upon the dead body in the lake.

When the narrator describes the environment in which he lived and when he calls that environment as being natural he foreshadows the fact that he is morally corrupt and is unable to tell right from wrong.

When the narrator says that everyone near the lake was a bad person is an understatement as it is later proven when the two men jump in to save the Fox from being raped.

It is alluded that the Greasy Lake is a visual representation if the moral status of the people living near it. Just like the lake was affected by pollution and became a body of murky water, the people living near the Lake were also affected and thus they became immoral and without a sense of justice and without knowing what is right and wrong.

An important image in the story is that of the three boys trying to rape the Fox after she got out of the car. In that moment, the teenagers were portrayed as being almost animals, unable to control themselves. This shows just how out of control the teenagers were and how far they were willing to go just to prove that they are bad and dangerous.

The characters in the story are paradoxical in the sense that while they wish to be perceived as being bad and negative characters, they are unwilling to do anything that would set them apart as being bad. Instead, they show their rebellion through small and meaningless actions such as going to a place known as being the spot where negative characters gather and altering their physical appearance through the clothes they wore and different piercings.

The narrator draws a parallel between himself and the dead body he discovers in the lake. The parallelism has the purpose here to highlight the idea that while he is not how he wants to be exactly, that is a person feared by those around him, he still has his life and that is the biggest gift he could ever have.

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