Why is the setting in "Greasy Lake" important?
The setting is a once clear but now polluted lake on the edge of the narrator's hometown. The lake is important because it is a liminal space, both part of the everyday culture the narrator and his friends know and yet separate from it.
The boys reach the lake after passing the markers of civilization, such as malls and housing developments. The lake, once called "Wakan" by the local indigenous tribes for its clear waters, is now filled with civilization's refuse and surrounded by empty beer cans and broken glass. Civilization has invaded its space.
But even though the lake is embedded in reminders of civilization, the narrator perceives it as a place of escape from the constraints of his society. There, he and his friends can get high, drink, smoke, watch a girl swim nude, and listen to rock and roll music. It feels liberating.
The setting is important...
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because the freedom it promises causes the narrator and his friends to act recklessly and get themselves into a threatening situation. The lake offers the illusion of a liberating manhood, the ability to "howl at the moon"; however, in reality, it shows that behaving without constraint can lead to dire consequences. These consequences can include death, which is symbolized by the corpse the narrator encounters in the lake and by the smashing of the narrator's mother's car.
The lake is dirty and the stomping ground of teenagers trying to be important.
There are two elements of setting—time and place. Both of these are significant to what happens at Greasy Lake. The characters are teenagers who are trying to prove that they are tough, and Greasy Lake is a perfect place to do it.
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.
The time period is not exactly given, but it is sometime during the mid twentieth century. The boys like to wear leather jackets and talk about cocaine, but they are wannabees. Going to the lake makes them feel tough. Exciting things happen there. It is where everyone goes at night.
The lake certainly isn’t much. It is not far from town.
Through the center of town, up the strip, past the housing developments and shopping malls, street lights giving way to the thin streaming illumination of the headlights, trees crowding the asphalt in an unbroken wall: that was the way out to Greasy Lake.
The name sounds terrible, but it is appropriate. The lake is described as murky, with a small island devoid of any vegetation but scrubs. Its shores are full of garbage from all of the teenagers who hang out there. Teenagers spend their nights there to “drink beer, smoke pot, howl at the stars” and listen to rock and roll music.
It is pretty much only in a place like this that the night’s mishaps could happen. The group of teenagers finds out that they are not as tough as they thought. The relative isolation of the lake, the time of night, and the depravity of its inhabitants results in the attack on the boys. There is a fight, and they attack a girl, “eyes masked with lust and greed and the purest primal badness.” Somehow in the midst of all of this, the corpse turns up.