What is probably the most important topic to discuss when explaining this story to a beginning literature class?

The setting and character development are paramount to the
story. The narrator of “Greasy Lake” grows and changes during his adventures is apparent
from the two views of “nature” he voices, one in paragraph 2 and one in paragraph 32.
Early in the story, “nature” was wanting

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to snuff the rich scent of possibility on the
breeze, watch a girl take off her clothes and plunge into the festering murk, drink
beer, smoke pot, howl at the stars, savor the incongruous full-throated roar of rock and
roll against the primeval susurrus of frogs and
crickets.

By the end of the
story, these swinish pleasures have lost their appeal. When, at dawn, the narrator
experiences the beauties of the natural world as if for the first time, he has an
epiphany: “This was nature.”  Greasy Lake is the perfect settin for Boyle’s story. Like
the moral view of the narrator (at first), it is “

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fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with
broken glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires. There was a
single ravaged island a hundred yards from shore, so stripped of vegetation it looked as
if the air force had strafed it”
(2).

The lake is full of
“primordial ooze” and “the bad breath of decay” (31). It also hides a waterlogged
corpse. Once known for its clear water, the unlucky lake has fallen as far from its
ideal state as the people who now frequent its shores have fallen from theirs.  Still,
in its way, Greasy Lake is a force for change. Caught trying to rape the girl in the
blue car, the narrator and his friends run off into the woods, into the water. Waiting
in the filthy lake, the narrator is grateful to be alive and feels horror at the death
of the “bad older character” whose body he meets in the slime. His growth has begun.
When at the end of the story, two more girls pull into the parking lot, the subdued
narrator and his friends are harmless. Cold sober, bone tired, they know they have had a
lucky escape from consequences that might have been terrible. Also, the narrator knows,
as the girls do not, that Al is dead, his body rotting in the lake. He won’t “turn
up”—except perhaps in the most grisly way. It is this knowledge and the narrator’s new
reverence for life that make him think he is going to cry.