Greasy Baptism (Setting)

Katie Lopes
Ms. Clapp
AP Literature and Composition
30 September 2008

Greasy Baptism

In Greasy Lake by T. Coraghessan Boyle, the main characters are classified as rebellious teenagers who are looking for trouble during summer vacation. In the end, the narrator reaches a turning point in the road to maturity. Coraghessan demonstrates that there are those moments of epiphanies in everyone’s life; people change. Coraghessan uses the setting of the story, being at a lake, to allow the narrator to be ironically baptized, which in the end shows his change in maturity and in character.
Before the “baptism,” the three friends were immature and lacked adult mentality. The narrator acknowledges himself that they “were all dangerous characters then” (130). They were three 19 year olds who “didn’t give a shit about anything” (130). This included consequences. They didn’t care about anything that happened to them, i.e. the consequences of drinking, of fighting, and of not caring. At two in the morning, “there was nothing to do but take a bottle of lemon-flavored gin up to Greasy Lake” (131). The three guys had no responsibilities or cares in the world. They even attempted to rape a girl at the lake, another act of adolescent immaturity. The lake was but another place to be bad.
The ironic greasy baptism is the point of change for the narrator, an epiphany. Having to jump into that lake was like being forced to see all of the horrible things that the narrator has done. There were “frogs, crickets” (134). As he jumped in, he conjured up the image of “reeking frogs and muskrats revolving in slicks of their own deliquescing juices” (134). That’s quite a gross thought. And yet, that is what the narrator was surrounded by, his own mistakes. When the narrator came face to face with the dead body, he “stumbled back in horror and revulsion” (134). Finally in the lake, the narrator felt his “jaws [ache], [his] knee [throb]” (135). It was as if he suddenly felt the consequences of his actions. That lake forced him to realize that, thus changing his mind towards his actions. It symbolized the death of a young delinquent that he once was, and the birth of a decent man.
After the “greasy baptism,” the description of setting perfectly foiled the change in the narrator. The more pleasant birds (associated with day rather than crickets with night) “had begun to take over” (136). There was a “smell in the air, raw and sweet at the same time, the smell of the sun firing buds and opening blossoms” (136). This symbolizes the beginning of change. The sun is just rising up; the narrator has just changed. The blossoms were opening, showing a new beginning. And of course, there is one last temptation that had to be resisted to show the change. When a girl in tight jeans offered the guys to take pills with her, Digby responded (speaking for all of them), “some other time” (137). This last girl was the ultimate temptation and he’s decided that he’s had enough. One of the last descriptions in the story is of the “sheen of sun on the lake” (137). Again, this reinforces the little change, the new beginning.
The setting is the main factor in this short story. How could the narrator have been baptized in a park? Certainly his ironic baptism symbolized the change in character and the rejection of the woman showed that. In the end, the narrator submerges into the dirty water of Greasy Lake in retreat and emerges with a cleansed sense of maturity and understanding.