A&P by John Updike is a short story from the account of a 19-year-old checkout boy at the local supermarket. Through their different perspectives, M. Porter, Lawrence Dessner, and Corey Thompson provide seperate interpretations of John Updike’s short story, with three different articles reveal contrasting understandings of literature and interpretation. Porter understands the short story as a narration of Emersonian freedom from the Establishment, and nonconformity to the loss of individuality, Dessner as an ironic underrating of adult life and Thompson as a release from the grips of inevitable future adult oppression. Porter analyzes the short story to be a narration of nonconformist ideals which cause the main character Sammy to take an …show more content…
Emersonian stance and outlook upon his future. According to Porter, the reason that Sammy quits his job at the supermarket is because he “has chosen to set himself against the majority – to incur that wrath which Emerson declared was the lot of the nonconformist” (Porter 1158).
In Porter’s eyes, setting himself against the majority is to break away from the bondage of a society that is destined to repeat the same old monotonous activities day after day. The nonconformist stance that Porter arrives at is also due in part to Sammy’s “rigid standards for quality” (Porter 1156). In the short story, Sammy mercilessly attacks the shoppers of the A&P and the townies of his New England community because he is “repulsed by their insensitivity, their loss of individuality, and by the joyless, wooden nature of their existence” (Porter 1156). In the short story, readers examine multiple occasions of Sammy as he disdainfully describes the store itself as well as its shoppers who he calls “sheep pushing their carts” or as “scared pigs in chutes”, these references lead one to the conclusion that the patrons flock in groups and do not seperate. “I bet you could set off dynamite in an …show more content…
A&P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists…” (Updike, A&P). Despite his contempt for his employment and the patrons, Queenie and her girls are a sight to be seen and are not erotically pleasing, but aesthetically pleasing. The girls give Sammy the opportunity to free himself from the bondage of the Establishment by following though with his actions of quitting. Upon exiting the store, Porter quotes Emerson’s “Self – Reliance” saying that Sammy has chosen to live honestly and be a man because “Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing” (Porter 1158). Dessner however sees the short story to be wildly ironic as the Sammy underrates adult and the responsibility that it comes with. Dessner finds Updike’s story to be ironic, because “While enormously overrating the world’s subsequent interest in his own employment history, Sammy enormously underrates the range and reach of the adult world’s terrors, those necessities which do indeed lie in wait for him, the exhibition of which has comprised the essential bulk of his narrative” (Dessner 317). Dessner arrives at the conclusion that much of Sammy’s personality and narrative is very dramatic as he has an inability to believe that he may indeed become what exactly he despises. Dessner does also acknowledge Sammy’s haughtiness towards the fact that Sammy feels like the shoppers of the A&P do not care about their appearance for example as he despises older women shoppers whose “varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less” (Updike A&P). Sammy also makes reference to another shopper who was “a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before” (Updike A&P). Sammy does not just mentally attack female shoppers, he also attacks the butcher, McMahon at the shopping market because he feels that McMahon is perverted and twisted for watching the girls and “patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints” (Updike A&P). Dessner says that “McMahon is what Sammy doesn’t realize he may consider himself fortunate to have become” (Dessner 317). Dessner is not saying that Sammy may someday be perverted but that Sammy would be fortunate to have a job like McMahon instead of working in s career in the city’s Department of Streets and Sewers whom Sammy refers to as “old free loaders”, or as a truck driver delivering cabbages. Dessner says that Sammy is jealous that when the girls walk in “he is entranced and made enviously defensive by his notion that the underclad shoppers inhabit a higher social station than his own” (Dessner 316). Sammy’s lack of knowledge about the real world and struggles in it create a strong presence of ignorance within him. “Of his own eventual settling into or battling to gain or retain standing in the social hierarch, he is merrily unaware” (Dessner 316). Thompson views the short story to be a story of release and escape from the grips of entering into adult tedium.
Thompson does not believe that the objectification of the girls is what made Sammy quit his job, he thinks that Sammy has wanted to quit his job because he has been working at the store for too long and because he can no longer handle the customers. Thompson believes that Sammy has been thinking of quitting his job for a while because everything is so well planned right down to the time of year that would be best to leave. Sammy narrates “One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow this up with a clean exit, there's no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes” which Thompson says leads readers to the conclusion that this is not a spur of the moment thought. Because Sammy has been thinking of quitting for so long, the girls simply are pawns in completing his mission, Thompson says “through masking his actions as chivalry Sammy uses the girls; for they act as catalysts that precipitate his well-considered decision to resign”. Instead of thinking that Sammy is a man of courage or defending his girls, “Sammy should not be regarded as a hero, but rather as a young man who takes full advantage of an opportunity to free himself from the responsibility – filled life that he desperately wants to avoid (Thompson
215). The three articles all arrive at different conclusions of the interpretation of John Updike’s A&P, and each one provides a unique insight. Porter sees the story to be about Emersonian freedom and nonconformity, Dessner to be an ironic underrating of adulthood and responsibility, and Thompson as a liberation from the bondage of adult oppression that would lay ahead of him. All three writers arrive at their conclusions through observations of societal conformity, Sammy’s judgment towards others, and the toll of Sammy doing the same thing day after day. Each article provides a different analysis of A&P with insightful views of the underlying message of the story.
First, the customers are compared to sheep which further pushes the message of Sammy’s boring life. Sammy reinforces this when he describes the customers, “All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word.” This quote compares the monotonous customers to sheep who are gawking at what’s going on but not commenting on anything. Second, the clothing symbolizes the difference between dull, the customers, and fresh, the girls. The typical A&P customer is “A few house-slaves in pin curlers” and dressed in “baggy gray pants,” while the girl have a “good tan” and “long white prima donna legs.” The girls not only appeal to Sammy’s male hormones but also to his yearning for something
In his short story "A & P" John Updike utilizes a 19-year-old adolescent to show us how a boy gets one step closer to adulthood. Sammy, an A & P checkout clerk, talks to the reader with blunt first person observations setting the tone of the story from the outset. The setting of the story shows us Sammy's position in life and where he really wants to be. Through the characterization of Sammy, Updike employs a simple heroic gesture to teach us that actions have consequences and we are responsible for our own actions.
John Updike's short story "A&P" is about a teenager who has to make a serious decision. The story is set in an A&P supermarket in a town north of Boston, probably about the year 1960. As the plot unfolds, Sammy changes from being a thoughtless and sexist boy to being a young man who can make a decision, even though it might hurt him.
At first glance, Sammy, the first-person narrator of John Updike's "A & P," would seem to present us with a simple and plausible explanation as to why he quits his job at the grocery store mentioned in the title: he is standing up for the girls that his boss, Lengel, has insulted. He even tries to sell us on this explanation by mentioning how the girls' embarrassment at the hands of the manager makes him feel "scrunchy" inside and by referring to himself as their "unsuspected hero" after he goes through with his "gesture." Upon closer examination, though, it does not seem plausible that Sammy would have quit in defense of girls whom he quite evidently despises, despite the lustful desires they invoke, and that more likely explanations of his action lie in his boredom with his menial job and his desire to rebel against his parents.
His annotation of the “women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less” (Updike 159) and “the sheep” (Updike 162) in the checkout lines are an illustration of his everyday repetitious life working at the A&P. He compares these women to animals showing his undeniable sophomoric juvenile behavior. John Updike depicts Sammy’s character as a typical young boy who thinks he is invisible to the idea that consequences apply to him. However, Sammy is granted the harsh actuality that he will no longer be given slaps on the wrist for radical decisions. His coworker Stokesie is twenty-two, married and has two children. Generally speaking, Sammy may still have childish actions but he understands that he does not want to work at the A&P the rest of his life.
The story unfolds when, “Lengel, the store’s manager” (2191) confronts the girls because they are dressed inappropriately. To Sammy, it is a moment of embarrassment and in defiance he quits his job. The student suggests that in quitting, “Sammy challenges social inequality and is a person who is trying to
Sammy’s point of view of conformity changes from passive to active which shows the growth of his character. Updike chooses a 19-year-old teenager as the first narrator. As a teenager, Sammy’s personal value is still developing and he is not fully shaped by the conformity, which suggests his quitting later in the story. Although Sammy’s perspective is unreliable since his thoughts are limited by his age, he gives readers a naiver perspective of the society. He simply considers the customers as “sheep” or followers when he works in A&P, such as: “The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle” (748). However, before he saw the girls, he was part of the conformity. He silently mocks the people being conservative, but does not show any rebuke against
Two Works Cited In John Updike’s "A & P," Sammy is accused of quitting his job for childlike, immature reasons. Nathan Hatcher states, "In reality, Sammy quit his job not on a matter of ideals, but rather as a means of showing off and trying to impress the girls, specially Queenie" (37), but Sammy’s motive runs much deeper than that. He was searching for a sense of personal gain and satisfaction. By taking sides with the girls, he momentarily rises in class to meet their standards and the standards of the upper-class.
Interpretation of A & P This story takes place in 1961, in a small New England town's A&P grocery store. Sammy, the narrator, is introduced as a grocery checker and an observer of the store's patrons. He finds himself fascinated by a particular group of girls. Just in from the beach and still in their bathing suits, they are a stark contrast, to the otherwise plain store interior.
Sammy worked a typical boring job and what seemed to be in a typical small town. The only person in the store he really related to was Stokesie, which is the foil to Sammy, because Stokesie is married, has kids and eventually wanted to be manger one day. Something Sammy did not want to stick around and see. The customers in the store were all pretty much the same, in which Sammy did not show much emotion towards except he referred to them as “the sheep pushing their carts down the aisle” (Updike 261). It is easy to tell Sammy did not like his job, but it also seemed he had no other option, as if he was stuck in his small town and there was no way out. Then out of the blue he saw three girls wearing only their bathing suites walk in the store. Sammy noticed something different about them, like they were liberated from the conservative values of those times; they were part of a new generation. Especially Queenie, he referred to...
John Updike’s “A&P” is a short story about a nineteen year old boy during the 1960’s that has a summer job at the local A&P grocery. The main character in the story, Sammy, realizes that life isn’t always fair and that sometimes a person makes decisions that he will regret. Sammy sees that life doesn’t always go as planned when three young girls in bathing suits walk in and his manager Lengel gives them a hard time, and he comes to term with that sometimes you make bad decisions.
From the beginning of the story, it is clear that Sammy in no way likes his job, nor is he fond of the customers and people he is surrounded by each day. To Sammy, they are nothing more than "sheep" going through the motions of life. "I bet you could set off dynamite in an A&P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!' or whatever it was they do mutter." (Updike, 693). He view them negatively; to him they are boring and useless, living mundane and unimportant lives and it's obvious through Sammy's portrayal of them that he doesn't want to ever become one of them, nor does he want to be around them any longer.
The lives we live today encompass many moral aspects that would not have been socially acceptable fifty or more years ago. John Updike’s short story, A&P, addresses these issues of societal changes through a 1960’s teenager point of view. This teenager, Sammy, spends a great deal of his time working at a local supermarket, observing customers, and imagining where his life adventures will take him. Through symbolism and setting, Updike establishes the characters and conflicts; these, in turn, evolve Sammy from an observational, ignorant teenager, promoting opposition to changing social rules, into an adult who must face reality.
It is important to realize that Sammy’s 19-year old depiction of his surroundings might be skewed, but the story still maintains Updike’s basic use of this setting. Updike choses the dull setting of an A&P grocery store as a symbol, a microcosmic example of the societies tendency to conform. Also, the readers can easily relate to a grocery store. This A&P resides in a town where “the women generally put on shirt or shorts or something before they get out of their car into the street,” Sammy explains. Seeing a girl walking around wearing only a bikini in such a public place looks outrageous. “If you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store…” The town is a conventional one. Updike turns this familiar, mundane piece of American life, and makes it extraordinary.
...up on Stokesie like sheep, Engel explains that policy insists that shoulders must be covered. Policy is what the kingpins want. What others want is juvenile delinquency. Like a champ Sammy throws in the towel. He watched as 3 girls bucked the norm and alternately was confident enough to quit altogether. They get away from him and his feet are carrying him to the place of his residence rather than a car, reserved for higher classes. He ends with the thought how hard the world was to be to me hereafter. Sammy?s variety of verbal simulations and creations for the reader reveal the social and economic classes of basic society. The adults like animals, the attractive women- analyzed on a pedestal in full description and personification, employees get harped on too. Stoksie was a little to ambitious for a bagger, and management was regarded like the rest of the animals.