Greasy Lake

Content Warning: This section references violence, attempted rape, and drug use.

The narrator introduces himself and his friends Digby and Jeff as bad in every way, shape, and form: “We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue” (8). The exaggerated quality of these details satirizes the persona of the bad boy and foreshadows that the boys are in fact putting on an elaborate act that gives them a sense of power and shared purpose. “Greasy Lake” then traces the unraveling of the “bad boy” identity and the violence this persona glamorizes. This unraveling reveals each character’s performance of “badness” to be a dangerous facade with real-life, irreparable consequences. References to films, books, and historical events draw connections between the boys’ violent behavior and everyday exposure to violence, further underscoring the performative nature of their actions and raising questions about Nature Versus Nurture and Male Violence. Meanwhile, the story’s first-person narration betrays the boys’ hidden innocence, even as they insist on the opposite.

The polluted setting of Greasy Lake serves multiple functions. In one sense, it is an exaggerated backdrop that parallels the boys’ behavior. The narrator frequently refers to the strange men at the lake as “greasy characters,” likening their crass behavior to the lake’s pollution. The parallel raises questions of causation. In the second paragraph, a long description of the lake’s literal and metaphorical contamination ends with the statement, “This is nature” (9). Since the lake’s state is clearly anything but “natural,” this raises the possibility that the behavior of the characters (particularly the boys) is likewise a product of societal decline. Like the first line of the story explains, “There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste” (8). The passage identifies the boys’ behavior as tied to a specific historical moment, implying that their violence is not an innate male instinct but is perhaps a “natural” response to their environment.

The narrator’s use of the word “decadence” hints at the problems with that environment, evoking the hollow wealth and consumerism of 1960s America. This capitalist culture is the same “environment” responsible for the lake’s condition—littered with cheap, mass-produced, disposable goods (e.g., “beer cans”) and “stripped of vegetation […] as if the Air Force had strafed it” (8). The reference to the air force also evokes American militarism, implying a connection between imperialism, capitalism, environmental degradation, and the boys’ malaise. This connection becomes more explicit in the narrator’s direct references to both Vietnam and World War II—namely, the battle at Khe Sanh and Norman Mailer’s popular war novel The Naked and the Dead. Both references casually point to acts of immense violence that were ultimately revealed to be pointless and decadent.

Though the boys have never been to war—in fact, the narrator has only been in one fight—they find themselves acting violently regardless. In a world where meaningless violence is the norm, the story posits there is no way to return to the purity that must once have characterized the boys as well as the lake. The boys adopt a bad-boy persona to maintain a sense of control only to end up reproducing their society’s destructive patterns. Historically, nature and the feminine are symbolically intertwined. Faced with the “murder” he believes he has just committed, the narrator imagines possible incarceration—“the gleam of handcuffs, clank of bars” (11)—and the young woman’s arrival only adds humiliation to the boys’ rising fear. Their attempted rape of the young woman is their struggle to regain the power they sought when confronting the first greasy character, but it springs from the same place as the impulse to dominate nature that has led to the lake’s pollution. (The narrator rationalizes his actions by remarking that the woman is “already tainted,” implying that like the lake and the boys, she too is irreversibly polluted.)

However, the attempted rape also complicates the notion that the boys’ violence is purely environmental. Though most of the story is told in the first-person singular, the narrator shifts into the first-person plural, “we,” just before the boys attack the young woman. At the same moment, the boys’ behavior becomes noticeably animal-like: “We were standing over [the man’s body] in a circle, gritting our teeth, jerking our necks, our limbs and hands and feet twitching with glandular discharges” (11). The boys initially act out violence to uphold their bad-boy persona: To turn away from the opportunity to fight would be to lose their carefully crafted reputations. Nevertheless, there are limits to the violence that society will sanction (at least explicitly), so when the young woman calls the boys out on this, they are “dissociated from humanity and civilization” (12). In dehumanizing the woman (e.g., referring to her as a “fox”) and acting as a mob, the boys can attempt acts they probably would not commit otherwise. The “primal” nature of their behavior, however, frames their violence not as a reaction to societal tensions and fear, but as an inherent, inescapable human trait.

Having finally experienced the violence and will-to-power they idolized, the narrator realizes that the boys’ adopted persona is not a game. The narrator, already shaken by having (he believes) killed a man and nearly raped a woman, discovers to his horror that there’s a body in the lake. When the narrator makes contact with the body, it gives “like a rubber duck” (13)—a child’s toy, which underscores the narrator’s naivete and therefore just how out of his depth he truly is. He is not prepared to face the consequences of being truly “bad,” whether that means death or succumbing to “nature” in the form of one’s own worst impulses. In either case, the result is annihilation of selfhood: the loss of the very sense of control and identity the boys were seeking.

By the end of the story, the boys have undergone a Loss of Innocence and are desperate to leave the lake behind. An intoxicated woman arrives at the scene and asks the boys if they want to party. She takes in their appearance and refers to them as “bad characters,” but the boys are silent and motionless: They can no longer respond to their identification with badness. The final image of the woman with her hand outstretched and the morning sunlight on the surface of the lake inverts the previous power dynamics. Where nature previously seemed to be at the mercy of humanity, just as the first woman was at the mercy of the boys, the narrator and his friends now turn away from the dark feminine of nature and toward the innocence they thought they wanted to escape.