What Is The Theme Of Outage By John Updike

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there front of you.”-John Updike. John Updike was an American writer who wrote novels, poems, and short stories mostly about relationships, divorce, and sex due to his first failed marriage. His short stories became famous by being published in the “New Yorker” magazine. Two of the many short stories that he has written are “A&P” and “Outage”. “A&P” is about a young man who sees three girls in a grocery store in bathing suits. “Outage” is about a town that has lost power and how a man and a woman see the power outage as something else. John Updike uses setting to develop conflict, diction to develop mood and tone, and a common theme to create a unique voice in

The most important being point of view. “A&P” is told through a 19 year old boy so therefore it is in his point of view. The way he treats the girls in the story is based on what a 19 year old would do for a girl. At the end Sammy quits and says, “They’ll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero” (“A&P” 3). This is what a teenager would do and someone older wouldn’t.
This helps to develop theme because then the reader has an idea of what to expect from the narrator. With power of desire being the theme, Sammy’s yearns for those girl’s to like him and think of him as his hero due to who his character is and how he acts. That is his desire from those girls. The desire in him took over and all he wanted was for those girls to acknowledge so he made the grand gesture of quitting his job to stand up for them/their attention but they didn’t even care. In the end, Sammy was left with no job and no girl due to the desire that took him over. In “Outage” the point of view is third person objective which means the narrator only knows as much as the character and is being told from an outside source. The reader knows that the main character in the story is an adult man who is married. The story reads, “ “You

Brad’s actions do not support his age or his family that the reader knows due to the point of view. Brad’s desire also takes him over and he feels the need to be with Lynne and he doesn't care about the consequences. As soon as the lights turn back on he snaps back into reality and comes to his senses. The power of desire drove both these characters into a bad place that they most probably will never be able to get out of.
Finally, John Updike uses setting to develop conflict, diction to develop mood and tone, and a common theme to create a unique voice in his short story writing. He was great writer who incorporated many elements to make his stories different. He was like no other writer because he mostly wrote about real life problems. Most of his stories are about what he has seen and what he had gone through in his