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Greasy Lake, the story’s primary setting, is described in detail that recalls its past beauty, current “ravaged” state, significance to the narrator, and potential for future renewal. The lake also serves as a proxy for readers who can recall their own Greasy Lakes, whatever hangout spots mattered to them in their past. The lake’s once-clear waters are now “fetid and murky,” and trash litters the banks. But Greasy Lake is still the place to go to “howl at the stars” as the incongruous sounds of rock music and insects overlap.
Greasy Lake met the narrator’s needs for community and pleasure during his high school years. But now, in the summer after college, something has changed. The idle young men chase something they can’t define, and when they can’t find it after three days of playing around in town, they return to this important setting to look for it. The narrator says that before college, they went to the lake because “everyone went there,” but on the night of story, almost no one is there, and the first person they encounter is a the “dangerous character” they had imagined themselves to be.
Greasy Lake in the pre-dawn hours is dark and frightening. Its mud, as the narrator hides in the water, sucks at his shoes as if to pull him down, and its shoreline waters present him with a corpse. Yet for all the horror of the night, the final description of Greasy Lake is promising. The sunrise triggers birdsong, and air smells “raw and sweet” with the promise of renewal. In the narrator’s last glimpse of the lake, as he drives away from the scene and from his childish sense of the permanence of life, is the “sheen of sun” on the water.
