Sammy's Dehumanization In A & P

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Every human being has their own perception, which creates a unique way in which they see the world and the people that surround them. Additionally, the perception of most people is influenced by life experiences, interactions with other people and individual knowledge about the world. With that being said, is openly understood that Sammy, in the story “A & P”, has quite a banal perception of the world and the people around him that reveals his lack of maturity, knowledge, and experience in life. However, more importantly, is that Sammy’s perception, described by the way he portrays, speculates, and judges the other characters in the story, is clearly impacted by the way he places them into social categories and dehumanizes them.
Without a …show more content…

The way he refers to girls, in general, insinuating that girls are not smart when he says, “You never know for sure how girls’ mind work (do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?)” (Kennedy 17). Then, he several times dehumanizes the customers when he references them as “sheep”. For instance by him saying, “The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle…” (Kennedy 17), or “I could see Lengel in my place in this slot, checking the sheep through” (Kennedy 20). Furthermore, he also references them as other things such as “houseslaves” and “pigs”. His constant degrading of the customers is noticeable and contributes not only to dehumanization but also to the moral exclusion of those others …show more content…

The girl he calls her “the chunky one” or “the fat one”, is portrayed by him as the typical bulky girl who loves to eat but wants to be skinny like the other two girls when he states, “The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but on second thought she put the packages back” (Kennedy 17). Afterward, he describes the second girl or “the tall one” as the type of girl that is egocentric just because the way she looks, “you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it…” (Kennedy 17). Then he calls the third girl “Queenie”, implicating that she was the one with power, the one who has the money, or the one who ruled over the other two girls. In other words, “The nickname assigned to her by Sammy points out the stereotypical snap judgment that Sammy makes about her personality and social status… [He] consistently portrays the girl as a stuck-up, spoiled rich kid who is just out to ‘shake up’ the middle-class A & P” (Smith). In spite of not knowing anything about these girls’ lives or personalities Sammy infers things about them just by the way they looked and act. By making these assumptions about the girls, mostly about Queenie, he is placing them into categories and he comes to conclusions according to the

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