The short story “A&P” tells a story about a day the local grocery store near the beach. Sammy, the main character, is the cashier never seems to enjoy his job at A&P and after an incident that happens, he stands up to the manager for what he feels is right and quits his job on the spot. Now how does this all happen? It all goes back to the place and time of this story which is in the 1950’s near the beach. The manager Lengel does not seem to be too strict at first but has his ways I feel.
He says to his manager that he quits hoping that it is quick enough for the girls to hear, turn around, and watch his heroic act but the girls continue walking. This attempt to impress the three girls displays a more chivalrous approach that he now has towards women. He stands up for the girls by quitting and telling Lengel that he “did not have to embarrass them.” (18) Even though Lengel is a good friend of Sammy’s parents and reminds him that they’ll be upset, the young boy sticks to his decision. Updike describes Lengel’s confrontation with the girls as making Sammy feel “so scrunchy inside” (19) that Sammy pops the drawer out of his register as his final act of duty at the A&P. When Sammy finally leaves the A&P, he looks for the girls in the parking lot but they are not there.
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).
Response Paper: A&P The short story, “A & P” by John Updike is a about a teenager named Sammy that works at a grocery store. In the story, three girls walk into the store in nothing but bathing suits and we follow Sammy’s reaction to the events that occur because of them. This story relates to my life because I also work at a grocery store. While I was reading this I felt like I could relate to many of the things that Sammy had to go through while he was working. The first thing that I related to from the story was the way that Sammy felt when he accidentally made a mistake with a customer’s order.
He seems to be surrounded by these characters bound to their boring lives. Sammy uses different names to describe the people he sees in his conformist town. He calls the customers in the store “sheep”, (Updike, 20) because of how blindly they follow their usual routine and “houseslaves”, (Updike, 20) are what he calls the house wives with pin curlers puttering around the store. He goes on to say that the customers are so enveloped in their grey lives that if someone were to set off a bomb in the center of the store that they would fail to even notice. One customer, “the witch”, (Updike, 18) as Sammy calls her, is described as a serious looking woman one who diligently watches the register he is on, eagerly waiting for him to slip up and make an error.
"A & P" written by John Updike tells the story of three adolescent girls, casually strolling through a grocery store wearing only swimsuits. Sammy is a young man who happens to work in the store and is very observant. He pays close attention to the three girls. He focuses on the most attractive of the three, the one who appears to be the leader and gives her a nickname, "Queenie". The girls' attire and the fact that they seemed to be aimlessly wandering about the grocery store only brought more attention to themselves, especially since the beach was about five miles away.
Nohn Digker 01/18/2011 English 1102 Assignment -1 The Consequences of Choice In the story A & P, John Updike uses Sammy’s immaturity to show the consequences of choices. Sammy a typical teenager shows an immature behavior like most teens. From the moment the group of girls catch his eyes; he loses his attention and could not remember even if he had rang up the Hiho crackers in his hand. He finds himself following the path of the girls with his eyes as they go about their business looking for the product they have come in to buy. Wearing a bathing suit in a grocery store is more like being naked in public.
nse, and I do not need to guess who has what thought inside their mind. I think the supposing, guessing, thinking is part of interesting in the novels, so It is important and critical that what kind of point of view is used in story. In A&P by John Updike, Sammy is a clerk who working in A&P. He is a young man trying to make some money. But the end of the story, he refuses to be stuck in the same job for many years or possibly the rest of his life.
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)”.
The qualities that the diction and dialogue bring out in Sammy are ultimately what indicate a transition beginning to take place in his life. Sammy is in his last year of being a teenager and displays extremely immature qualities, the worst of them all being his impulsivity. Sammy quits his job not in some heroic effort to right a social wrong or even because he dislikes his job, but because he wants to impress three strangers who will probably never think of the act again. Sammy quickly realizes that prioritizing females over a job was probably the wrong decision when he is outside of his former place of work “[feeling] how hard the world would be to [him] hereafter.” Once he has stepped out of A & P, he has not just stepped outside, but into another part of his life: adult hood. This transition for the painfully obviously unprepared Sammy is uncomfortable to watch unfold because the reader knows that he is doomed based off of his mindset and