“A&P” 1093aisles of the store. They attract the notice not only of
Sammy but also of his coworkers and, unluckily, of
the puritanical store manager, Lengel. Scandalized
that Lengel has rebuked the girls for their attire,
Sammy rashly quits his job, in the hope that the
girls will appreciate him as a hero. However, even
after Sammy realizes that the girls have left the store
without knowing of his heroism, he goes through
with his resignation and realizes that he has taken
a step toward nonconformity, which will cause him
difficulties in the future.
Various aspects of the setting are significant
to the story’s overall meaning. Sammy’s dialect is
colored by the time period in which he tells his
tale: the late 1950s or early 1960s. At this time, the
United States was in the midst of the cold war and
had been engaged in trying nonconformists as com-
munists. To highlight the theme of nonconformity,
Sammy reveals that the A&P at which he is working
is “north of Boston” and that customers such as the
evil “witch” whom he has to check out would have
been “burned . . . over in Salem” a few hundred years
before. Additionally, he tells his audience that within
the view of the store is the local Congregational
church. All of these aspects of his immediate setting
point to a puritanical witch hunt and parallel the
stark uniformity that was sought by the anti-Soviet
America of his day. Sammy is working in the A&P,
the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, which
he tellingly suggests might someday be named “the
Great Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company.”
The store is arranged in neatly aligned aisles, with
those inside behaving in tightly prescribed patterns.
In such a constraining atmosphere, Sammy is look-
ing for an escape. He ultimately chooses to go his
own way, whether through maturation, inner hero-
ism, or more radical, politically charged motives.
Maura Grace Harrington
comInG oF aGe in “A&P”
The 19-year-old protagonist of John Updike’s “A&P”
tells this story shortly after the event has happened,
and he assumes that this event will be decisive in
his life. There are several indications that he has
matured during this experience. However, there are
other factors suggesting that this maturation is not
complete, and that it is only happening in degrees.
Still, it is significant that the narrator, Sammy, is able
to identify this experience as one through which he
has broadened his perspective and has consequently
come to the conclusion that his decisions can serve
to limit his future possibilities.
The changes that Sammy undergoes as a result
of the events on that fateful day at his place of
employment are indicated by the stylistic narration
choices that Updike has him make. Simply by look-
ing at the first and final sentences of the short story,
the reader can see a development in Sammy’s ability
to use language effectively on the sentence level, as
well as an increased awareness of the needs of the
audience. In the first sentence, “In walks these girls
in nothing but bathing suits,” Sammy makes a glar-
ing grammatical error. He also does not provide the
reader with an adequate sense of setting or any sort
of an introduction. Throughout the story, Sammy’s
language becomes increasingly descriptive until, at
the end, he is describing the effect that his decision
will have on him for the rest of his life: “I felt how
hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.”
The word “hereafter” is very much unlike the more
elementary words that Sammy had been utilizing
at the beginning of the story, just as his ability to
foresee the consequences of his actions is light years
away from his narrow view of the present before he
makes his decision. He ends his narrative with a
conclusion, one that satisfies the reader because it
takes him beyond the world of the store and pro-
vides some judgment on the actions that he has just
taken. Sammy has matured as a storyteller as a result
of recounting this tale.
The changing quality of the thoughts that
Sammy recounts as the events unfold marks him as
a person who has matured through this experience.
At the beginning, Sammy simply sees the girls in
the supermarket as objects, and specifically, as the
sum of their parts. He dwells on the appearance of
their skin, hair, facial features, and derrieres. He even
wonders, at the beginning, whether a girl can have
a mind or “just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar.”
Once he hears the voice of “Queenie,” however, he
begins to acknowledge that she and, by extension,
her cohorts are actually human beings. He imagines
her family and even compares the experience that
he imagines her to have to his own experience. This