The Setting In Tom Boyle's Greasy Lake

Tom Boyle did a great job in the writing and describing the setting in the story “Greasy Lake”. The words he uses and the way he puts together his sentences makes it easy for the reader to visualize the setting. The setting in Greasy Lake makes you feel as if you were there and the description makes it seem as if it were not long ago. Boyle described everything from what they wore to the feeling of touching a floating dead body. The setting of this story is very important because the time period sets the tone of the story. All the description of the bad boys, their ways, and the times – late 1960’s – foreshadows a bad ending.
Boyle does a fantastic job in painting a picture of the setting in the readers head. The whole story reflects on the good and bad times of the late 1960’s. Boyle never states the exact year or time but the description leads you to believe that the setting takes place during the late 1960’s. Boyle describes how snotty the characters were. He writes, “We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our

He states how an Indian Tribe named it Wakan, which meant clear and that now the lake is murky and full of beer bottles, and remains from fires (129). Now with all the curiosity at the times, people would not care, therefore did not take care of the lake and turned it into a mess. The characters were driving in one of their mother’s 1957, metallic blue Chevrolet Bel-Air. Boyle again hints the time the setting takes place as after a second car, most likely a friend of the guy they got in a fight with, was a Trans-Am (134). The Trans-Am was most likely a 1969 model as they were the most popular. At the end of the story, two women, most likely high on drugs, go looking for the dead guy floating in the lake. It was sunrise when the women came in, and shows how crazy and uncaring it was back then and how loose women were and how they would not take care of