Greasy Lake
The central metaphor of the story is its titular lake. At one time a pristine body free from the corruption of men, it has since become a fetid, oily pool of cess that foretells the journey from innocence to experience and symbolically signals the lubricious events that will force that transition from which it will be impossible to return.
Male Oppression and Dominance
Teenage girls are at the center the transition into maturity and along with that transition comes a much less equitably balance of power. When the three boys struggling to become men are chased away from their attempted enforcement of that manhood upon the girl wearing only panties and a man’s shirt the narrator uses a precisely connected set of metaphors in describing how “the girl's screams rose in intensity, disconsolate, incriminating, the screams of the Sabine women, the Christian martyrs, Anne Frank dragged from the garret.” Each screeching metaphor is associated with the imposition of dominance and forced authority over the powerless.
The Ducky Drowned Dead Body
The narrator also chooses a gruesomely appropriate simile to describe what the corpse floating in the murky waters of Greasy Lake feels like. When he reaches to touch it, the texture of the skin “gives like a rubber duck.” It is the sort of the comparison that only someone young enough to still vividly recall playing with rubber ducks in the tub would even think to make, thus linking it to the overall theme of maturation from childish innocence to the more slippery morality of adulthood.
Art House Bad Boys
The perception of themselves the three young men at the center of the story want to project and the reality of what they are can be summed up in perhaps the single most illumination simile the narrator makes. In attempting to engage a figurative comparison between the bad boys he and his friends had sought to project and attempted to become, he gives himself way by describing their attempted gang assault on the lone female victim as being “on her like Bergman’s deranged brothers.” Even though the reference is to a similar gang rape, the movie being reference is an art house favorite of one of the most arty of all film directors. Even in the concerted effort to present an image of he and his friends as frenzied animalistic psychopaths driven by pure adult sexuality, he cannot help but reveal they are actually sensitive outliers in a world where pretty much the last movie with a plot about rapists real bad boys would have reference would be The Virgin Spring.
Dangerous Character
The very first description the narrator provides of himself and his two friends is the metaphor that will drive the narrator and foster the story’s theme of lost innocence. “We were all dangerous characters then.” While it sounds like a proper literal description, by the end of the story it has become an irrefutably ironic metaphor. These boys were not then and ever will be dangerous characters in the true sense of the term. Their very concept of dangerous is entirely metaphorical as it is based on cultural representations of from fictions created by authors like Andre Gide and filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman. The ill-conceived attempt to prove themselves dangerous based on a misguided apprehension of dangerous results in self-enlightenment, but at the cost of the innocence that created that misapprehension.
