The Lonesome Place (Cultural Context)

The Lonesome Place is about two young boys, Steve and Johnny. The narrator of this story is Steve and Johnny is his best friend. These two young boys are terrified to walk by a grain elevator at night. There is no light and seems almost abandoned. Almost every night one or both of the boys has to walk by the elevator. They always run as fast as they can to get to the other side.The next day they tell stories of what they saw. They believe there is a creature living in the place behind the elevatory and each night they add something new to what it looks like. Steve and Johnny believe so adamantly that something is there that Johnny actually tells his parents about it and then gets punished. For some reason Steve's mother always makes him go down to the store just when it's getting dark. He always begs and pleads with her, saying that he will going in the morning to get what she needs, but ne never seems to prevail. The boys eventually grow older and seem to somewhat forget their fear of the lonesome place. They know how spooky it is and sometimes take girls there so the girls will walk close to them, but even Steve states that no matter how pretty the girl is he never lingers there. One day the boys find out that a little fat boy named Bobby Jeffers was killed by the grain elevator by some sort of animal. The boys then start to believe that it is their fault because they left the creature there to get someone else who couldn't run as fast as they could.
Fear of the unknown has a lot to do with this story. The boys were afraid of what they couldn't see. It was fine to walk past the grain elevator by day, but at night the creature came out. I think the boys were just having the same fears of the dark as any other little boy or girl would have. They imagined the creature and basically kept adding to its image until they forgot about it. Even as adults people are afriad of what they can't see. When you're a child there's a monster in that dark spot with no light, but as you get older the fear morphs into more practical things. Instead of there being a monster in the dark, maybe there's a thief or someone there waiting to hurt you. Fear of the unknown, especially the dark is a pretty worldwide phenomena.