His little encounter with the dead biker opens his eyes to everything that is alive in the world.
The narrator is shaken by the experience and he will never be the same again. The night was long and the events shocking. The narrator moves from thinking of himself as a dangerous young man to a "mere child, an infant" (116). Later when the girl asks them to party, the narrator says, "I just looked at her. I thought I was going to cry" (119). This statement reveals how the narrator has changed. He no longer looks at the world in the same way and he no longer feels the same way about it or the people in it. He has touched the cusp of becoming a man in that he has touched death and understands how real it is. One significant aspect of this turning point is seen when the narrator experiences the fresh morning air. He writes that that the "birds had begun to take over for the crickets, and dew lay slick on the leaves" (118) and the air was "raw and sweet at the same time" (118). Clearly this is not the same young man that bragged about sniffing glue and wearing torn leather. The boy at the beginning of the story would have never appreciated anything about a sunrise. Regardless...
It is through his eyes that we have an understanding of what he experienced that night. The teenager went from thinking he was bad to realizing he was actually not bad at all and the notion of his badness was simply in his mind. Had this story been presented in third person, the narrator's experience would have been diminished because it would have seemed less real to the reader. From the first-person narrative, we understand that this is an initiation story as the narrator suddenly becomes aware of his new appreciation of humanity. The narrator had to fall into the greasy lake to discover that he was rather squeaky clean before the incident. Without seeing the events through his eyes, we would have missed the power of them. Instead, the author decided that the story would be more real if we walked through the events with the narrator.
Works Cited
Boyle, T.C. "Greasy Lake." Literature: an Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Kennedy, X. J,. ed. New…
