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Although we do not know the exact place and time of Boyle’s “Greasy Lake,” we do know that the setting plays a significant part in how the story relates to the protagonist. The setting of the story is in the outskirts of a large town in the North East, probably upstate New York (Ithaca), since Digby “allowed his father to pay his tuition at Cornell.” The main part of the setting is a murky lake, littered with trash, beer bottles and junk--even a dead body. This greasy lake mirrors the main character and his friends because all of its ugliness and mischief is caused from the outside encroaching on its purity. The narrator comments on the lake’s former name: “The Indians had called it Wakan,” a reference to the clarity of its waters. “Now it was fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires.” The lake apparently used to be beautiful and clear, now known for its dirtiness and mucked up waters. From the onset, the main character describes his adolescence as "a time when courtesy…went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste." He and his friends fancy themselves as "dangerous characters," like many teenage boys do, with their cogent evidence consisting entirely of their pretentiously imposing wardrobes and the fact that they are ready and willing to consume any intoxicating substance that they can get their hands on, whether it be glue, ether, or "what somebody claimed was cocaine." This mindset is typical of adolescent males: self-centered, self-serving and rebellious. Yet unapparent to the main character and his pals is the fact they are, in reality, not the bad characters they think they are.
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