In John Updike’s “A&P”, the main character Sammy quits his job as a cashier for the A&P grocery store. He doesn’t quite because his job is difficult or his manager treats him negatively. He wants to improve his quality of life and not end up working his whole life there. The quality of life he sees in the girls wearing bathing suits that walked into the store was that of luxury and riches. The store he was working at was dull and monotonous, and he did not want to end up like his store manager Lengel, who was telling the girls they cant wear bathing suits to the A&P.
A&P Analysis John Hoyer Updike’s short story “A&P” shows an eighteen-year-olds’ point of view of a 1960’s era grocery store. The dynamic protagonist, Sammy, explains the mundane lifestyles of the customers in the store based on his observations from the checkout counter. Suddenly the store is disrupted by three girls that enter the store wearing only bathing suits and defy the organization of the business. Sammy wants to change his cookie cutter lifestyle; after observing the girls, he realizes he does not have to conform to the social standards he was lead to believe. Sammy observes the patrons of A&P mundanely going about their shopping, like “sheep pushing their carts down the aisle” (6).
John Updike’s “A&P” is the story of a cashier at a grocery store and how he matures. One of the ways Updike expresses this is through the main character’s views and description of the opposite sex. Sammy’s changing attitude towards women displays how he grows and matures throughout the story. His harsh criticism of the way women think and look is displayed right from the beginning of the story but is later shown to be a bit softened. The reader sees this through his negative description of the regular shoppers and of the woman he checks out in the beginning, his mixed feelings about the three girls, and through his effort to defend the three girls in the end of the story.
The story has some bad examples, especially if you are a young reader. “Sammy, you don’t want to do this to your Mom and Dad, (A&P, page 298)”. Here is an example of when Sammy quits because he saw the beautiful woman and now he wants to go hang out with them because he is fed up with his store manager. As a young reader, they might get the idea that Sammy did the right thing, while older readers will argue that the story provides teens with bad examples and thus may cause them to think like Sammy when they encounter such situations. A second example I would add is, “But remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside (A&P, page 298)”.
Everyone doubts him now and thinks a company that has been the same ever since it was built cannot and should not be transformed. Customers have their own reasons that they shop at JCPenney and if they do not like the change, then they will not shop there. Then again, people who have not shopped there for a long time might like the change and start shopping there again. It all kind of depends on people’s morals and how they like
After believing that his race is inferior for so long, Mike Pedro has finally discovered that being Filipino is not so bad after all. Ever since his friends mocked him at school for packing “Asian” food for lunch, he started feeling insecure about his ethnicity and even his own identity. Who is he, really? That is the question he asked himself every day from then on. The thoughts of his friends degrading him for eating “Asian” food for lunch dwelled in his subconscious for months, or perhaps even years.
At the beginning of the story right after the girls walk in, the reader can already tell that Sammy is bored at his job. The reader sees this by the way that he completely disregards the lady he is checking out so that he can have a chance to stare at the out of the ordinary sight of the girls. Also, the reader sees that he dislikes some of his customers by the way that he thinks about the old lady. Later, the reader figures out that he has been working at the A & P grocery store for quite some time and that he no longer really pays attention to what he is doing; he just goes through the motions. This is shown by him tell about how he has made a song in his head to the noises of the cash register makes.
. At the end of the story he tries to be the hero for the three girls by standing up for them hoping to receive their approval, but the girls completely ignore him. Sammy loses his job and as he leaves the store he looks around for the three girls, but they are long gone. He takes one last look into the store window and sees that Lengel has taken his spot behind the checkout counter and continues checking out customers as if nothing has happened. As Sammy walks away from the store, he
Persuasive/Argumentative A&P Throughout the short story of “A&P”, the main character Sammy makes a few decisions that reflect on him as a person. Sammy is a grocery clerks man who works the cash register at the store called the A&P. Physical attraction, going about quitting his job, and lack of responsibility shows just who he is. One might say he is nothing more than a foolish immature young man. To begin, the way Sammy describes the girls at the “A&P” shows just how immature he is. “With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light” (540).
The short story is about an old fellow, who comes to the plum pudding store once a week. The problem is that the man does not buy any plum puddings, but he samples them. Therefore he gets the plum puddings for free and actually steals from the store (– definition as a thief). We see the story through the woman’s eyes, therefore the shop girl has the prejudice that the man is poor and cannot afford the product. Even though the man was neatly dressed, she still has the prejudice that he is poor.