The Short story I have Chosen is A & P by John Updike.

Introduction

John Updike's best known, most anthologized and most frequently taught short story, "A & P," first appeared in The New Yorker (22 July 1961: 22-24), a publication that assumes a reader with considerable literary and cultural knowledge. Updike, for whom literature and art have been intertwined since youth,(1) uses allusions to art and to art criticism to give the informed reader of "A & P" the experience of dramatic irony as a means toward constructing significance for the story. The popularity of "A & P" rests on a number of ironic ambiguities,(2) but the reader who perceives Updike's allusions to art can take special pleasure in the plot, which leaves the nineteen-year-old narrator and protagonist, Sammy, feeling at the end both triumphant and sad, both winner and loser.(Edgar,369)

Discussion

Because Updike wrote "A & P" for The New Yorker, the story assumes a reader whose response to Sammy can go far beyond what the character can articulate for himself.(4) Walter Wells, calling attention to the elevated diction which concludes Sammy's highly "ambivalent" epiphany, suggests that "hereafter" points Sammy toward an indefinite future in which he may or may not find "viable alternatives" to a "defunct romanticism" (133). I hope to show in this essay that Updike offers the reader a way to see that Sammy's narrative, as a completed artistic gesture, is already in the mode of one of those alternatives. Sammy does look ahead as he senses the inadequacy of available cultural forms to express his sexuality and his moral sensitivity. Sammy does not, however, renounce the source of his will to act as he did. That source is triple: first, the ability to respond erotically to the beauty of a young woman's body; second, to respond sympathetically and imaginatively to the individual person alive in that body; and third, to elaborate that double pleasure into expressive form.(Saldivar,22)

If Sammy has learned anything at the end of his story, he has learned it via his romantic desire which, though naive and selfdramatizing, drives the plot of "A & P." We can think of Sammy's narrative as Updike's gesture to give Eros a form that will both ennoble and extend it as an aesthetic pleasure--while intensifying the impossibility of that desire's completing itself in anything other than art. In other words, Updike has created in Sammy a character who attains the awareness of a modern artist, but who does not know that is what he has done.

“Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark and gray and his back stiff, as if he'd just received an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.”(Updike737)

An epiphany is an instance of sudden truth brought about by a ...