Compare and Contrast Essay

John Updike's "A & P"

The setting is a small town north of Boston around 1960. Sammy is trying to clarify why he has impulsively quit his job as a cashier in the local A & P supermarket. (Peden 11-70) He needs a sympathetic listener (or reader), someone who will grasp the meaning he is constructing for himself as he puts his actions into narrative order. Collapsing past and present in rapid yet reflective colloquial speech, Sammy tells how three teenage girls, barefoot, in bathing suits, came into the A & P store to make a purchase. As they move through the aisles, Sammy, from his work station, first ogles them and then idealizes the prettiest and most confident of the three. He names her, to himself, "Queenie"; and though he jokes with his fellow cashier about the girls' sexiness, he is quietly disgusted by the butcher's frankly lustful gaze as the girls search for what they want to buy. (Porter 1155-1158)

Worse is his manager's puritanical rebuke for their beach attire as Queenie pays Sammy for her purchase. Outraged that his manager, Lengel, has made "that pretty girl blush" and wanting to demonstrate his refusal of such demeaning authority, Sammy quits his job on the spot. Though the girls leave without recognizing their hero, and though his manager tries to dissuade him from disappointing his parents, Sammy feels "that once you begin a gesture, it's fatal not to go through with it" (196). He acts decisively, but the girls have disappeared from the parking lot by the time he exits the store. (Peden 11-70) In practical terms, Sammy's action has gained him nothing and cost him everything, but his narrative affirms his gesture as a liberating form of dissent.(3) Sammy does not see how he could have done otherwise, though he finds himself at odds with the only society he knows, sure that "the world will be hard to me, hereafter" (196).

Through the cool light of the A & P, Sammy's vision of beauty, totally indifferent to him, paddles toward him, away from him, back again, up and down the aisles, over rhythmic repetitions of green and cream, colors of ocean and foam, giving a new resonance--for the informed reader to the story's setting: Atlantic & Pacific. For William Fleming, "the chief expressive interest" of Botticelli's painting is in such fluid wave-like movement, (Porter 1155-1158) "the ballet-like choreography of dancing lines and the skillful pattern of the richly varied linear rhythms" (363).

In the short story, " The A&P," by John Updike, the author seeks to make his point using an unlikely setting and scenario. Using a supermarket as a metaphor for a society, Updike illustrates how breaking the norms of society evokes fear and brings about intolerance in people. (Peden 11-70) When a society is accustomed to only one way of doing things it will not be accept anything different. Members of a society fear change, and only behavior that deviates from the status quo. They resist allowing new ...