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A & P By John Updike Setting Analysis

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Every day we pass by men, women, boys, and girls of all different ages. We expect the adults to act mature like normal adults, and the kids to act like children. In the beginning of John Updike’s story “A&P”, the setting is in a store with an older woman watching to make sure that the cashier makes no mistakes with her order. However, when the cashier does mess up, the lady gets upset and warns the cashier of his mistake. After the woman leaves, the cashier goes back to looking at the girls, while other customers are now also starting to notice the girls. The young girls are dressed in two-piece bathing suits that are attracting a lot of attention. The girls go to check out, and are warned in a rude way by the manager to not come back into the store without the proper apparel being worn. Sammy views these people just like a teenager normally does, however if he was an adult he would have a different outlook on how the girls were dressed. Let’s start with the first customers that are talked about in the story. As the story begins, we are told about an older woman who intently watches to see if Sammy is going to ring up her order wrong or not. Sammy does, and is …show more content…

After the girls start to walk out, Sammy turns to Lengel and tells him “I quit” (152). After arguing with Lengel for a few minutes, Sammy tells him why he is frustrated. He states that “You didn’t have to embarrass them”, and Lengel replied with “I don’t think you know what you’re saying” (152). Lengel tries to talk Sammy out of quitting but it is a dead end, Sammy’s mind was already made up. Sammy felt like Lengel had done wrong by confronting the girls about the way that were dressed because Sammy was young, and immature so he didn’t feel like they were dressed inappropriately. However, Lengel was a mature adult and had a different outlook on how the girls should be dressed so they wouldn’t attract the wrong type of

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In the short story, “A&P”, by John Updike, the central idea is that you are always being judged even when you think you aren’t. The author’s use of characterization helps reveal the central idea through the three girls. The three girls physical appearance were constantly being judged by society. Through Lengel’s actions and one of the girls be referred to as Queenie, the reader becomes aware of how judgmental society is toward females. In fact, Lengel goes on to say, “we want to decently dress when you come in here” (3).

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He is a young man about nineteen years old very unsatisfied with employment of working as a cashier. He had been working for” A & P” for a long period of time to know that he’s was not satisfy, but as he’s continue to work with his back facing the opposite way from the door and later then realize the three girls in the store down the aisle. He is stunning by the way the girls were dress. As he rang up the old lady crackers trying to remember if he rang it up once or twice calling the lady “a cash-register-watchers,” (Updike 17). As he look up at the girls who were wearing nothing but just their bathing suits.

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In “A&P,” Sammy shows his support for the three girls by quitting his job. After Lengel confronts the girls, Sammy says, “I quit” (Updike 159) to Lengel showing his support. According to a critic, “Sammy feels ashamed of Lengel and the “crummy” mentality he represents” (Saldivar). Later, when Lengel questions him, Sammy says that Lengel should not have embarrassed the girls in front of everyone (Updike 159). As Sammy feels bad for the girls, he stands up for them thinking they might notice him (Updike 159).

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The story takes place on a hot, summer day at a grocery store called the “A&P”. The protagonist is a nineteen year old male cashier by the name of Sammy. The central conflict occurs when Sammy watches three girls in bathing suits enter into the store to buy some herring snacks. Sammy gleefully watches them and gets attracted to the middle girl, “Queenie”, eventually being infatuated for her.

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“A&P” by John Updike is a short story expressing the issues of female objectification and degradation in society by following a young A&P employee’s views (Sammy) as they change through experiences second hand. Sammy goes from stereotyping objectifier to a form of a public defender, standing up for girls who can’t really do so for themselves. Sammy initially characterizes and describes all of the people in the store based on their looks and his initial opinion of them, rather than waiting to make judgements based on their personality, or not at all. He is very critical of looks, and is judgmental about why and how they look or act the way they do.

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The remainder of the week she said nothing to the boys. They covered themselves at every opportunity. Although they became slightly more comfortable during calisthenics and actual practice, they were still bashful when it came to their exposure. On Friday afternoon, the girls filed into the locker room. They found the same poster sized note on their door and once again remained dressed in their school uniforms (dark blue slacks and white blouses) and filed out to the pool with their flip-flops.

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Sammy is a nineteen-year-old cashier at a small store. Not used to seeing girls enter the store dressed that way, Sammy is shocked. Not being able to keep his eyes off the girls, Sammy notices details about their dressing. Sammy states, “She had on a kind of a dirty-pink bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down” (Updike, par. 3). We can see Sammy is sexually desiring these girls by the way he takes in every detail of the girls’ physical appearance.

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The grocery store was not that busy, informed in the story that “The stores pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again” (Updike 475). Sammy did not miss the opportunity to keep his eyes on the girls, especially since he was instantly interested in Queenie who was introduced to us as the leader among the girls. Each of the girls was different and had bathing suits on. Sammy was very descriptive about each bathing suit; he included many details. Queenie “had on a kind of dirty-pink beige maybe, I don’t know bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down, they were off the shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess"(Updike 473).

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“They must have been familiar sights… walking around the shopping plaza in their shorts and flat ballerina slippers…” (Oates 1). The story makes the girls appearances feel as if

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This is where the dramatic conflicts comes into place because Sammy is upset that Langel has embrassed the young ladies. (Until almost the ending where Sammy confronts Lengel) Sammy does not stay quite and starts to stand up for these girls. Sammy is so displeased with Lengel's actions that he quits. Sammy quits his job because he wants to start living the life that the girls in the bathing suits were living.

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This helps the reader visualize a sarcastic and frustrated cashier ringing up an impatient customer. Sammy refers to the customers as “sheep” in paragraph five because of their conformity and slow mosey throughout the store also making the three girls stick out more. In paragraph 2, Sammy refers to one of the girls as a “queen” using a direct metaphor as if she truly was a Queen. This reinforces Sammy’s observant mind and way he breaks down each girl. Whether his opinion was positive or negative, deducing women by their looks and staring at their chests, “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,”(3), does nothing but further supplement the idea that these three girls are being watched just because of their choice in attire.

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Point of View of John Updike’s “A&P” In the short story A&P written by John Updike is written in the 1st person naïve point of view. A&P is considered 1st person naïve because the narrator is too young to be trusted. He also is telling us the story as he feels to be the truth. The main character of this story is Sammy and the author Updike chooses 1st person to Naïve because he wants to show the readers what Sammy is thinking from his point of view aka his emotions and reactions to certain situations.

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