The Significance of Setting in “Greasy Lake”
The title alone told me that this story had some amount of darkness to it, but the setting of "Greasy Lake" is what eluded me as to what would happen next in the story. The author, T. Coraghessan Boyle, foreshowed each phase in the story by providing the reader with such a detailed description of the setting that the reader could make relatively correct assumptions about forthcoming happenings. The setting of Greasy Lake is significant in that it foreshadows what is about to come about in the story. It keeps the reader interested and entertained throughout the story.
I first knew something bad and rebellious was going to happen when the author described the time period that the story took place in. "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"(130). The characters in the story wanted to be bad; it was cool to be bad during this time period. "We wore torn-up leather jackets and, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine" (130). These are the clothes and attitudes of misfits, rebels and druggies who think they are untouchable by the rules of society. "We drank gin and grape juice, Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai. We were nineteen. We were bad." (130). The characters are trying to tell us that they drank and partied and that this made them cool because they were only nineteen. I knew then these obviously weren't stand up citizens going out for a fine dinner. These were mindless children looking for trouble. I could tell where this story was headed by the way T. Coraghessan Boyle laid out the setting of the story.
The way the author describes the lake itself, again led me to believe that something mischievous was going to happen in the story. "Now it was fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires" (131). This tells me that Greasy
I first knew something bad and rebellious was going to happen when the author described the time period that the story took place in. "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"(130). The characters in the story wanted to be bad; it was cool to be bad during this time period. "We wore torn-up leather jackets and, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine" (130). These are the clothes and attitudes of misfits, rebels and druggies who think they are untouchable by the rules of society. "We drank gin and grape juice, Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai. We were nineteen. We were bad." (130). The characters are trying to tell us that they drank and partied and that this made them cool because they were only nineteen. I knew then these obviously weren't stand up citizens going out for a fine dinner. These were mindless children looking for trouble. I could tell where this story was headed by the way T. Coraghessan Boyle laid out the setting of the story.
The way the author describes the lake itself, again led me to believe that something mischievous was going to happen in the story. "Now it was fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires" (131). This tells me that Greasy