Analysis Of John Updike's Short Story 'A & P'

Girls, Girls, Girls

A & P by John Updike is a short story written about a boy, named Sammy, who was a cashier at a small grocery store near the beach. It is about his series of decisions he makes after three girls, in bikinis, walk in. He has a vivid imagination and most of the story is describing what he specifically notices about them. Lengel, Sammy 's boss and manager, walks over to the girls and gives them a hard time about what they are wearing, when they are about to check out at Sammy 's register. At the conclusion of the story he quits his job, for a reason he considers to be a good one. Sammy makes the wrong decision, because it was impulsive, irrational, and, short lived. What lead him to this decision? Was it worth it for him

Literally minutes after he quit he knew it was a dumb idea. When he quits, he try’s and say it loud enough so that the girls will hear him. After he quits he looks around and the girls have already left the store. He goes outside looking for them, “I look around for my girls, but they 're gone, of course. There wasn 't anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn 't get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon.”(Updike) After this moment, even Sammy knew that the decision he made was absurd. He thought he was going to be the girls’ hero, instead they didn’t even acknowledge what he did in the least bit. His escapade was very short lived. The text even states how he knew the ‘world’ would be harder after this point, “Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he’d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.”(Updike) He knew that he had made a mistake and there was really nothing he could do to take it