In the short story “A&P” written by John Updike, three girls walk into a commonplace grocery story in their bathing suits. In the story, Updike closely examines multiple facets of the American culture, one of the the most interesting and entrancing of which is the rigid American class structure. His depiction of the girls, especially of one girl whom the narrator dubs “Queenie”, presents the idea of unbreakable boundaries between the upper and middle classes and how the notion of decency decisively separates the two classes in the American society in the 1960s. In the second paragraph of the passage, the narrator introduces one of the three girls as the “Queen”, which clearly states the her superiority that Sammy perceives. “She was the queen”, a powerful phrase that is mentioned over and over in the passage so as to show the how dramatically different the girl is from the rest of the consumers who frequent A&P. Shortly follows is a description of Queenie’s actions: this queen did …show more content…
(bathing suits) Queenie does not fit into the backdrop of a banal supermarket located in an average middle class town, and the glares from a few “house slaves” who frequent there is a great proof. Moreover, Narrator also imagines the personal life of Queenie, of how the way Queenie’s family is going to make use of the herring snacks: people dressed in “ice-cream coats” and “bow ties”, picking up “herring snacks on toothpicks”, while holding drinks with “olives and sprigs of mint in them.” Sammy also contrasts the up-scale parties with the ways that his family treats guests-- drinks in glasses with silly cartoons stencilled on-- and again highlights the