John Updike A & P Analysis

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Growth John Updike’s “A&P” is a short story that takes place in a grocery store in 1961. This story is told by a 19-year-old employee named Sammy through the use of a stream of conscious narrative. Conflict emerges in the first sentence of the story when three young girls enter the grocery store wearing only bathing suits, immediately grabbing the reader’s attention. Sammy cannot keep his eyes off them, especially the leader he refers to as Queenie, going into detail about each one of their appearances and the reactions of the other A&P customers and his married coworker. As the girls make their purchases, Sammy’s manager, Lengel, intervenes and humiliates the three girls in front of Sammy and the rest of the A&P shoppers for their inappropriate clothing. Sammy feels bad for the three girls and disagrees with Lengel’s methods. In respect to his …show more content…

At the beginning of the story, the reader can sense Sammy’s detachment from his job by the amount of time he spends observing and describing his surroundings and customers in detail. In addition to his lack of interest for his job, Sammy continues to mock the A&P’s customers by referring to them as sheep several times throughout the story. His repeated use of the word sheep signifies how little he thinks of the herd like shoppers. Besides these first evident examples of Sammy’s immaturity, the indisputable example is his chauvinistic view of women. Immediately after the first page, the reader can presume that Sammy does not know a great deal about women. As he is describing the girls he includes degrading comments about their “cans” and describes Queenie’s breast as “… the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known…” (Updike 242). The most narrow-minded of his internal commentary emerges when Sammy questions, “… do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar...” (Updike

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