payment page
The Significance of Epiphanies
In fiction and in life, an epiphany is a sudden realization that changes what someone thinks—about themselves, about their place in the world, about life in general. Any fictional character can have an epiphany, but characters in coming-of-age stories are particularly likely to experience events that shift the way they see the world. They typically move from naive understandings of themselves and the world, from understandings appropriate to children to more realistic understandings with which adults grapple. Usually, these characters’ epiphanies help them begin the challenging transition from childhood to young adulthood. The realizations they have may be painful, but they are necessary and significant, as they propel the characters toward maturity.
In “Greasy Lake,” the narrator—and perhaps Jeff and Digby, whose thoughts readers can only partially infer—has two significant epiphanies. Both force him to let go of naïve or immature views of the world. First, he learns that, in the right situation, he is in fact a “dangerous character” capable of engaging in the worst of human behavior. In short, he can be and do evil. Second, he learns that even the worst of “bad characters” can be undone by a small thing—a prank gone wrong, the frantic swing of a tire iron, or an accident by a lake. In short, he is mortal and at risk of fate. By the end, near tears, sick to his stomach, and exhausted, the narrator wants to go home to his parents and crawl into bed. He may do so, attempting for a day or two to avoid the unwelcome lessons of the epiphanies he experiences at the lake, but readers can assume that his worldview will never return to its more naïve adolescent state.
The Power of Primal Urges
Emotions run hot in “Greasy Lake” and drive much of the story’s action. At times the story seems to present a pageant of desires that expose characters’ flaws and get them into trouble. When “gland-flooding” chemicals are in play, the effect of these urges is enhanced. From the story’s opening paragraphs, primal urges are in play. The friends feel pride based on puffed-up self-deceptions. As the narrator looks back at his younger self, he is sympathetic but unsparing. He and his friends “struck elaborate poses,” read the cultural critics in style, and pretended not to care about anything. They admire themselves perhaps a bit too much, but in retrospect, the narrator knows that prideful urges led to foolish mistakes.
Boredom and restlessness also drive the action, sending the friends into the night to look for something they can’t define. These urges lead them into the clutches of the strong primal urges of rage, vengeance, and lust, over the course of the pre-dawn hours by Greasy Lake. When the friends pull their juvenile prank, expecting to go on to “new heights of adventure and daring” after a few good laughs, they instead are slammed up against the large man’s implacable rage. Caught off guard, the narrator is kicked into temporary submission and responds with an equally fierce rage mixed with humiliating “impotence” at having so suddenly been bested. He hasn’t been in a fight since sixth grade, but his vengeful thoughts go immediately to the tire iron. Later, Bobbie will use the same tool to exact revenge on the narrator’s car when he can’t use it on the narrator. While swept up by these urges, the narrator’s thoughts stray to fictional murderers who confess that “something” came over them and thinks, “Exactly.” Perhaps most alarming to the narrator is the ease with which lust overcomes him and his friends when, already amped up on rage, they assault Bobbie’s girlfriend and are only just prevented from raping her.
Deriving Universal Truths from Common Experiences
“Greasy Lake” is a story about a small group of characters and is told from the tightly focused perspective of a first-person narrator. It happens in a single location in a matter of hours and is hardly a drawn-out hero’s journey or a sweeping epic in which good and evil clash. Yet the special genius of the short story genre is that a story and perhaps even a single scene can encapsulate and convey ideas and experiences that have broad, even universal application. The experiences of an individual can resonate with many readers. It’s possible that the narrator’s name is never spoken (although Digby says it “twice, terse and impatient,” toward the story’s end) because he is something of an Everyman character. On the one hand, his experiences are unique to his story. Not every reader is male, not every reader comes from an economically privileged background with summers of bored leisure time, not every reader is stuck driving his mom’s old car. But most readers have been in situations that suddenly felt threatening. Many have had to make decisions on the fly and have committed a “tactical error” in haste or carelessness. Most have looked back with regret, wishing they had chosen better or grasping for explanations. And while few readers, it can be assumed, have bumped into a floating corpse at night, the narrator’s confused panic as he tries to get his wits in that moment is all too human. He calls himself “a mere child, an infant,” helpless to process the scene when confronted by the ultimate human universal: the awareness of the mortality of others and of one’s own inevitable end. In a Q&A with readers, Boyle says of the story that in one way or another, we’ve all been in that murky lake in the dark.
