Tone Of Greasy Lake

 



“Greasy Lake” is a terrifying piece.T. C. Boyle masterfully depicts a society of “badcharacters” that most of his audience has not experienced for itself.The pressures and dynamics which move andshape the actions of every individual in the piece are orchestrated to showwhat Boyle illustrates as a people who “cultivated decadence like a taste.” Itis both incredibly disturbing and powerful.
  1. Aol Mail
  2. Greasy Lake Short Story Full Text

Boyle's 'Greasy Lake', is the story of a man's youthful and life-changing experience. The unnamed narrator vividly elaborates about a night he and his friends venture out to Greasy Lake and find more than they were looking for. How would you describe the tone of the story 'greasy lake'? Questions in other subjects: Social Studies, 03:31.

The tone ofthe piece greatly reflects the culture described, acting as an agent to drawthe reader into the first-person narrative.Every step the author makes is part of a long, chemical process to suckthe reader in.The imagery is disgustingand symbolic; a lake once pure and clear is now “murky and fetid”, its banksstrewn with trash and broken glass.Thisspecific detail seems like a philosophical afterthought when first read, anattempt to factor disdain for the reigning society and actions to come in thescenery.Then the main character triesto swim across it.The main character isbeing chased, tries to swim across it, and discovers a dead body.The amount of potency in that moment alone isenough to knock the reader out of breath.Yet though it is the most pungent of the passive realizations, it isminute in scope to the emotional deathblows dealt to Boyle’s audiencethroughout.Never breaking tone, Boylebreaks down the ingredients of every disgraceful scene.From the murder (or what is assumed as such)to the attempted rape, I found myself trapped to read over each line multipletimes.Had I not, my initial flinchingduring the subject matter would have done what my subconsciousness intended andwithdrawn from the raw violence.
Mail
Instead Ifully drank the formula Boyle required in order to dream this nightmare.The morality was bent to that of a “badgreasy character”.The main character’sconcerns were not primarily for his disgusting actions.At least three times he freaks out thinkingabout how much trouble he will be in.Though I think it is safe to assume that by the end this is adistraction.
Tone Of Greasy Lake
Thesentence “This was nature” is employed twice in the piece to top off a heftydescription of scenery.This acts as avisible turning and driving force in the main character’s view.Whereas the first shows a loose andrebellious culture outside of supervision, the next is a stark contrast.Looking at his wrecked car in the midst of awaking day, the main character is done with being “bad”.

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.

Aol Mail

Aol

Male Oppression and Dominance

Greasy Lake Short Story Full Text

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.

Tone Of Greasy Lake

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.