1092 Updike, John
the sake of violence. Hank laments that the knights
use the awesome strength they possess “to hack
and batter and bang each other for six hours on a
stretch,” rather than “put it to some useful purpose.”
He also notes the grotesqueness of the tournament,
which results in “quacks detaching legs and arms
from the day’s cripples,” simply for the sake of sport.
While the Boss jokes about how lightly the knights
regard such violence, comparing them to children
engaged in war play, the more serious undertones
of this culture of violence are revealed in the cruelty
with which the gentry treat the commoners.
During his adventures, Hank witnesses the
violence inflicted on the commoners by the gentry
in the form of taxation, fines, and deprivation of
personal liberties. He refers to revolutionary France’s
Reign of Terror as “the momentary Terror” com-
pared to the terror of “life-long death from hunger,
cold, insult, cruelty and heart-break” suffered by the
so-called freemen under the feudal system. While
he is traveling with Sandy, Hank witnesses a young
slave woman being whipped and then “torn apart by
force” from her husband and child when she is sold,
a scene which foreshadows the Boss and the king
later becoming part of that same slave train while
they are traveling incognito. The Boss is infuriated
when he protests that he and the king are freemen,
only to find that the burden of proof is on him. He
draws a pointed analogy between the condition of
slaves in sixth-century England and the condition
of slaves in 19th-century America. He seems moved
by the tribulations of the common people and pas-
sionately advocates replacing the feudal system with
a democracy in which slavery is abolished and all
people have the right to participate in government.
Yet the Boss’s own violent actions seem to
undermine the democratic ideals he ostensibly
champions. From the outset of his tenure in the
sixth century, Hank uses violent and destructive
measures to secure his own position and serve his
own best interest. Nearly all of his grand demonstra-
tions of “magic” involve explosives or firearms, and
all are enacted in an effort to maintain his position
and power. These demonstrations include blowing
up Merlin’s tower and detonating explosives at the
Valley of Holiness when he “magically” restores
the flow of water to a sacred well. In his efforts to
abolish knight-errantry, he uses a pistol to shoot
his competitors in a tournament. Although Hank
initially envisions democratizing the land through
a bloodless revolution, he later resorts to killing
thousands of knights with torpedoes in the Battle
of the Sandbelt, turning them into a “homogenous
protoplasm” that cannot be identified or counted as
individuals, and he proclaims to his boys in a victory
speech that “while one of these men remains alive,
our task is not finished. . . . We will kill them all.”
Hank preaches democracy and equality, but
he hypocritically determines to be the boss of the
entire country from the moment he first discovers
his predicament and refuses to relinquish his repub-
lican ideology, even after the commoners revert
to their ingrained feudal mentality and abandon
the cause. In a last-ditch effort to force his own
system of government on the unwilling population
of sixth-century England, the Boss decimates the
knighthood in a gruesome and catastrophic manner,
using his knowledge of 19th-century technology to
produce a degree of force the knights can neither
predict nor equal. Those knights who are not blown
to bits by the torpedoes hidden beneath the sand
belt are electrocuted by the wires that surround the
Boss’s compound or riddled with bullets from his
Gatling guns. This is precisely the type of despotic
behavior Hank condemns earlier in the story, when
he critiques the feudal system and the established
church for the violence caused by their unflinching
ideologies. His own brutality points to the irony of
his criticism of the church and gentry, and the social
condition of 19th-century America is likewise sati-
rized through this comparison.
Kristine WilsonuPDikE, JoHN “a&P” (1961)
John Updike’s 1961 short story “A&P” is told from
the viewpoint of Sammy, a 19-year-old cashier at
a run-of-the-mill grocery store. During the sum-
mer, Sammy’s mind is preoccupied while he is at
work. When three teenage girls come into the A&P
wearing only bathing suits, Sammy is reminded of
the more exciting world outside the A&P, and he
immediately takes an interest in the comings and
goings of the girls, led by Queenie, up and down the