A&P AND THE LIFEGUARD

A&P and the Lifeguard both short stories by John Updike

A&P and the Lifeguard both short stories by John Updike

Characters Behavior and Personality

In The Art of John Updike's "A & P" (Studies in Short Fiction, jump, 1997) Toni Saldivar makes a case for Updike's creating a article of spectacular irony wherein Sammy is Sandro Botticelli and the three females are the figures glimpsed in his The Birth of Venus. This is an interpretation leap far more drastic than I wish to take.(Gilbert,1992) It's factual that the girls have appeared from the seashore (if not from a clam shell); and Queenie is like Botticelli's Venus in respect to an elongated neck. "She held her head so high her neck, close to up out of those white bears, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was." We furthermore realise that the Harvard educated author was a scholar of art and would understand the work of Botticelli and the writings of Walter Pater that Saldivar uses to buttress her theory.

To me, Sammy is simply a young man with an appreciation of beauty that is erotic but also artistic and intellectual. He will not end up like his checker ally Stokesie "married with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already" at age 21. Sammy's resignation from his job in dispute of Lengel's embarrassment of the girls displays a heroism that elevates him above Stokesie, who "thinks he's going to be supervisor some sunny day, perhaps in 1990 when it's called the large Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea business or something."

Sammy does not understand what lies in his future. All he knows is "how hard the world was going to be from here on in." He sees past Queenie's impropriety and answers with a esteem for her sign and her going through with it regardless of the censure of the head lifeguard of the A & P, the Sunday-school-teaching, policy-following, iron-spined Lengel. He disapproves of the leering butcher McMahon who has been "sizing up [the girls'] joints" as if they were meagre meat.(Luscher, 1999)

Sammy will somehow transcend the sheep-like customers who reside five miles from the beach and haven't seen the ocean in 20 years. The baggy-pants-wearing purchasers of monster containers of pineapple juice. He will not remain in the provincial village of two banks, a Congregational place of adoration, three real ...