The story of Grassy Lake by T. Coraghessan Boyle, portrays a dichotomy in nature in which events, surrounding and attitude shifts dramatically from being really good to really bad. Circumstances in this story go from being extremely exciting to really scary at a moment’s time. The natural surroundings themselves, as talked about in the story were once clean and serine to now being horribly dirty and vile. Even the language changes dramatically throughout the story. These three things, events, surroundings and language gives the reader a very different view of the character as he is in the beginning of the story to that of the end.

In the events of this short story the two friends and the narrator are claimed to be “bad characters ” “we wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths.”( 409,1) As the events of the night unfold to a seemingly a regular ending to a drunken night, they end up at Greasy Lake. The three friends mistake a “metallic blue, 57’ Chevy”(409, 5) as a friend’s car. After honking the horn and flashing their lights they realized that in fact the car was not their friend’s at all. Out of the drivers side jumped a “bad character in greasy jeans and engineer boots”(410,9) right away he kicked our narrator right in the chine knocking he to the ground. At that moment one of his friends (Digby) jumped at him with a kung-fo kicked that didn’t do much damage. The four of them fought until our narrator pulled a tire iron out from under