*this old literary analysis essay of mine is being shared as a sample blog for making a video tutorial*

Coming-of-age stories are popular in literature. It is easy for readers to connect with stories of maturation in adolescent experiences. Such stories also provide the perfect opportunity to teach the audience valuable life lessons. In Z. Z. Packer’s “Brownies” and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “Greasy Lake”, two fictional coming-of-age short stories, setting and point of view are used to mark changes in the protagonists’ mind frames. These devices develop themes of entrapment, confrontation, and their effect on the transition from naivety to maturity. Through these stories, readers also learn important lessons that become clear to the main characters as they come of age.

Both stories are written from a first person point of view in the past tense. The narrators are the protagonists, at much older ages than they are during the time the story takes place. In “Brownies”, Laurel was a fourth grader, but she is telling the story using the language and understanding of an adult. The same is true for the narrator in “Greasy Lake”. He is a teenager during the story, but his narration points to him being an adult while recalling the experiences. Laurel uses language like “chromatized”, “conspiratorially”, and “exaggerated” (38, 41, 50). This is not the vocabulary of an eight or nine year old. As an adult, she can articulate in a more sophisticated manner and better express the nuances of her story that may have been missed if she told this story as it happened. She can recognize the dread, the discomfort, the oppression, all the emotions that led her to the realization that “when you’ve been made to feel bad for so long, you jump at the chance to do it to others” (51). The boy uses language like “incongruous”, “extricate”, and “blundered” (530, 531, 533). This is not the vocabulary of a sixteen or seventeen year old. As an adult, the boy can also better articulate his feelings during the story. In the moment, he would have been afraid and too scatterbrained to explain the events coherently. Whether a reader recognizes these details consciously or not, the language and verb tense still gives readers the feeling that these characters make leaps in maturity during their stories. Those leaps are what allow the protagonists to reflect and tell their stories the way that they do. This includes the manner in which each narrator describes the settings of their story.

Although it is coincidental that each story takes place in the woods near fresh water, it is important to see the parallels between the way the characters act and the way they perceive their surroundings while remembering their experiences. Laurel, who is called Snot for most of the story, first describes the girl scout’s camp on page 40. She recalls the way the sunset looks behind the tree’s “canopy of black lace”. On page 42 - 43, she describes the stream as “embrowned with dead leaves and the murky effigies of other dead things.” In this part of the story, the darkness of the world is distant. Laurel doesn’t have to face the harshness of reality here. However, on the bus where she tells the story of the Mennonites, “there was nowhere else to go” (50). Here she has to confront what is mean in the world; it isn’t far off in the stream or behind the trees.

Similarly, the teenage boy’s transformation is reflected in the way he describes Greasy Lake. In the beginning of his story, Greasy Lake is as bad as our narrator wants to seem. It is “fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken glass and strewn with beer cans”. To him, this is nature as it should be: wild and dangerous. After the fight in the middle of the night, hiding in the lake to avoid being beaten to death, and discovering a dead body there, he can’t escape. He has to confront the way he is. This is where the narrator realizes that being bad isn’t so great. He doesn’t want to be tough anymore because he’ll end up just like the dead man in the lake. As he crawls out of the lake, the sun is rising. The darkness fades away and flowers open up. Now this fresh morning world is nature as it should be. In both stories, these characters may not have come face-to-face with their troubling realities if the settings of the stories were different. Once they were pushed into the corner, they had to fight the monster in front of them because there was nowhere else to run, which is what had marked their previous mind frames. They matured because they had no other choice.

By being stuck in situations that made it necessary to confront issues that became apparent in the stories, Laurel and the boy come of age much quicker than their peers in the stories. It is Laurel’s experience with the Mennonites and the boy’s discovery of the body in lake. No other character gets the same experiences as the protagonists, so our main characters have to be responsible for their own actions. If they could have ignored the problems, or pushed them on others, they wouldn’t have matured and their stories wouldn’t teach readers anything. Instead, Packer and Boyle teach readers about oppression and tolerance, responsibility and gratefulness.

Works Cited
Boyle, T. Coraghessan. “Greasy Lake.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry,
Drama, and Writing. 12th Ed. Boston: Pearson, 2013. 529 - 536. Print.

Packer, Z. Z. “Brownies.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and
Writing. 12th Ed. Boston: Pearson, 2013. 38 - 51. Print.