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.
Here is a spoon for you to use.” The girl lets the old man sample from the store. And later she wants to buy him a pudding; it would give her such pleasure. The man samples not just one The man samples every pudding in the store, but he never buys anything, and he has done it for years. He says he is never satisfied with the plum puddings therefore he gets to sample the next one. (E.g.)
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).
The first contains struggles against rules which is the three girls walking in dressed inappropriately at the supermarket, “A & P“. The whole time that the girls are wandering around the store to purchase their item, Sammy watches their every move and simply is attached to the leader of the group whom he calls “Queenie”. The store manager
In one supermarket, they placed a few beers on a top shelf in a cereal aisle and it sat unnoticed as shoppers picked up cereals around it. When asked after they checked out, every shopper stated that they were unaware of the beers that were there. It is vey important that items are placed correctly in a supermarket because the markets for beer drinkers are not going to be looking in the cereal aisle for beer. The film also illustrates a young teenager and a young woman that are very frequent shoppers. This young teenager is only thirteen years old and has the need to go shopping almost every weekend, and the young lady is grown but has an addiction to a specific designer named Chloe.
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. Sammy mainly quits his job because he wants to move up in life and actually live it. When he sees the “queen” of three girls walk up to the register with the “Kingfish Herring Snacks” it suddenly hits him. He realizes that these girls are from a wealthy class, “ all of a sudden…picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big plate” (Updike 134) who are living the good life. Sammy also saw a foreshadowing of his future if he had kept his job.
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.
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).
In the story A&P by John Updike, the story is told by Sammy, a nineteen year old cashier, in first person narration. Sammy is an immature, observational teenager with a healthy interest in girls. There are many examples that show this behavior and it is displayed when three girls walk into the store one day in provocative beachwear. Sammy analyzes the girls bit by bit who were very noticeable and how they standed out among the rest so much, ultimately causing Sammy to ring up and old lady’s crackers twice. Sammy infers this one girl is the queen and infers that this queen who he ends up calls Queenie is showing them how to walk and keep their posture.
When Sammy is ringing up the customer at the beginning of the story, he describes her in a quite ugly manner as a “cash-register-watcher, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows.” This could be attributed to the way that men looked at women during that time when women as housewives were unappreciated. Throughout the story, we listen to Sammy talk about the women in the store and describe them solely based on their outward appearance as a housewife, much like his mother and other matriarchal figures. He makes derogatory statements about “house-slaves in pin curlers”, and “women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs”. However, if one thinks about the typical 1960’s housewife found in vintage films and television shows, it mainly shows a “Suzy home-maker” in a frilly apron and heels. He uses the word "Sheep" to describe the store regulars, as they seem to follow one and other, in both their actions and reactions to the girls who come into the