The person behind this article, M. Gilbert Porter states, “Sammy reveals through his descriptions of the store and its customers that implicit set of values which will ultimately set him against community mores.” Sammy describes the customers in a droning matter and how repulsed he is by their dullness and impassive character of their existence. It is until “three bathing beauties”, as Porter declares, stroll into Sammy’s workplace and grab his attention. “To the graceless dowdiness of pin curlers and varicose veins, they offer the contrast of winsome innocence and supple youth,” Porter proclaims. I find Porter to be exceedingly intuitive in his imagery, in his extensive well-written article about Sammy’s inside thoughts. He does a remarkable job analyzing Updike’s words and demonstrates it in a very comprehensible structure.
Emily Nguyen Mrs. DiTallo L.A. per 5 5 April 2012 A&P Cause and Effect Essay The interesting short story “A&P” by John Updike is about a teenage boy named Sammy. The story starts, when three girls come in the store in only their bathing suits and Sammy notices them. Sammy then he starts to analyze them until they came to checkout their item until Lengel, the manager, starts an argument with the girls. Sammy, for a strange reason defended them and finally quit and going out to the parking lot to find the girls, which is nowhere to found. In “A&P”, the circumstantial causes intertwine with Sammy’s “choice” causes to create effects which speak directly to the story’s theme.
However, under the psychoanalytical lens, the reader is able to truly understand the main character’s motivation to quit through his inner desires about the three bikini-clad girls, and interactions and thoughts on Stokesie and Mr. Lengel. The first psychic zone of the psychoanalytical lens, which is known as the ID, provides the reader with a personal outlook when understanding Sammy’s motivation to quit. Specifically this is seen within the aggressions and desires he harnesses. His aggressions can be found to relate back to his unhappiness when working at A&P, while his pleasures are found in his fantasies of being appreciated by the three girls from the beach. Nevertheless, to truly understand how internal aggressions and desires are shown to lead to Sammy’s rash decision, one must first learn the role the ID pertains to all literary creations.
Women’s stereotypical household role is cooking in the kitchen, hence the word choice “pepper-and-salt”. Even more ironic, most people would say, “Pass the salt-and-pepper.” Phrasing it backwards feels unnatural, suggesting the unattractiveness of Miss Emily’s hair color. Also, females are supposed to be womanly, so comparing her hair to that of an old man seems offensive. When Miss Emily is seen again around the time she meets Homer, the narrator says her hair was “cut short, making her look like a girl” (240). Once again Faulkner is hinting at society’s idea of a perfect female as a mature woman, which Emily’s hair cut
The theme “Sammy’s Desire to get out of his dull life” is expressed through many examples of symbolism. The first example of symbolism is the girls bathing suits. The bathing suits symbolize that the girls desire attention. Another example of symbolism is when Sammy quits his job. This situation symbolizes Sammy’s desire to get the girls attention.
My Mistress’ eyes are Nothing Like the Sun 1. Rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg 2. The initial tone of the poem is Satirical and mocking. The poet does not direct the mocking tone at his Mistress, but rather at the world, who seems to believe that women and love is perfect and that no fault can be found with the one you love. The poet gives the impression of repulsiveness when he speaks of his Mistress’s hair and breath (“Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.” “If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head.”) He uses a tone of honesty when describing her unpleasant voice (which he loves to hear) and the way she walks (“I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound;” “My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.” He uses nature’s beauty to describe her complete imperfection in comparison to nature.
AN ANALYSIST OF A&P BY JOHN UPDIKE John Updike wrote “A&P” a short story about a man named Sammy and his observation on a day at work. The main theme of the story is choice, and how those choices affect you and the people around you. From the three girls who do their shopping in bathing suits and getting talked to by the manager for wearing inappropriate clothing, to all the shoppers deciding what items to buy, but mainly at the end when Sammy decides to quit. He has an idea of what some of the consequences will be; he knows that quitting his job will impact his mom and dad. Sammy feels he has to take a stand and he will not back down.
When a lovely lady comes up to Sammy’s register to check out, Sammy makes a mistake. Sammy complains “I ring up the HiHo crackers again and the customer starts giving me hell. She’s one of those cash-register watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheek bones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up.”(Updike 409). After the situation was sorted out, Sammy concludes “By the time I got her feathers smoother and her goodies into a bag – she gave me a little snort in passing, if she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.”(Updike 409). In my eyes, the way Sammy approached this situation was immature and irresponsible, because a simple apology could have changed the outcome.
This is significant because Rita’s lively and irreverent speech is a source of humour in the play. For instance, when Rita animatedly refers to a painting, using words such as “erotic” and “tits” she is clearly comfortable talking in this manner to her lecturer, this makes conservative Frank feel uncomfortable and as a consequence he replies to her with brief answers. Just this conversation alone has comedic value as it shows how very different these two characters are, they have opposing lifestyles, behaviour and seem to be moving in opposing directions. In the first encounter between Rita and Frank, their dialect and everyday speech confuses them both as Rita speaks in a colloquial language and Frank in Standard English. Her understanding of a simple question ‘And you are?’ asked by a well-educated person confuses her and she fails to understand what is really being asked.
In the “A&P” Sammy whose stature on life is changed by three girls who show him that being different can also be sane. Sammy has an unusual stand about women and the way he talks about them. One way he does this is how he explains how a girls mind works. “Do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar (Updike 441).” He used words which he thought resembled these girls such as, “chubby, chubby berry-face and the tall one, with black hair (Updike 440)”. This helped to distinguish the girls apart from one another.