Greasy Lake

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1985

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Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Car and Car Keys

From the opening paragraphs, it’s clear that the narrator lacks adult independence. He is 19 years old, lives at home, and doesn’t have his own car but instead drives his mother’s. What would typically be a symbol of agency and mobility—the car itself—is therefore a symbol of the narrator’s naiveté. Driving his mother’s Bel Air around town with his friends allows the narrator to feel grown-up and “bad” while underscoring how sheltered he actually is.

The saga of the car keys consequently develops the theme of the Loss of Innocence. One of the first “mistakes” of the evening that the narrator identifies is his loss of the keys. This minor accident, he concludes, “opened the whole floodgate” and was “a tactical error […] damaging and irreversible” (9). Losing the ability to escape and return to the comfort of his home, the narrator and his friends must embrace the darkness of the night and its events. It is not until the boys have encountered real “badness” that the narrator recovers his keys, allowing him and his friends to return to the comfortable lives they were previously fleeing.

Grease, Ooze, Slime

Throughout the story, the textures of grease and ooze are a motif surrounding the intertwined themes of Capitalism and the Environment and the narrator’s loss of innocence. The lake itself is greasy due to human pollution and neglect. Similarly, the narrator refers to other men at the lake as “greasy characters” as if to differentiate himself from them, drawing a distinction between his own performance of “badness” and the other men’s true evil. When the narrator flees to the lake, he finds “ooze sucking” at his shoes and imagines “reeking frogs and muskrats revolving in slicks of their own deliquescing juices” (13). After the “greasy” men leave, the narrator remains waiting in the water while “primordial ooze” surrounds his body. The lake is the site of change for the narrator, representing a baptism or rebirth, and its viscous qualities evoke birth itself. The confrontation with the dead man in this setting reveals that the narrator is not cut out to be a “greasy” character.

War and Battle

The story’s many references to war, such as the battle at Khe Sanh and the war novel The Naked and The Dead, are more than time stamps to place the narrative in the 1960s. These references, and the way the narrator relates to them, constitute a motif that develops the theme of Nature Versus Nurture and Male Violence. In war, violence is often justified. Soldiers commit brutal acts that are valorized rather than questioned. This attitude trickles into culture at large, creating an atmosphere in which violence seems permissible or at least inevitable. For example, when the boys move to assault the young woman, the narrator refers to their actions as “Ur-crimes” (12). Ur-crimes are “primitive” or “original” crimes, implying that the boys are acting in ways that are “uncivilized” but prototypically human.

The story does not resolve the question of whether the boys’ violence (or violence generally) is innate or learned. However, it does evoke the traumatic consequences of violence, including for those who commit it: “We looked at her like war veterans” (17), the narrator says when he and his friends are about to head home. Now on the other side of a “battle,” they are, like war veterans, forever changed.