Critical Essay
Jason Williams
May 15, 2010
Eng 2510: Contemporary Literature

Conflict and Change in John Updike’s “A&P”

All of the events in John Updike’s short story “A&P” take place in a small town grocery store north of Boston, where Sammy, the main character, works as cashier. Sammy is nineteen, a late adolescent boy on the verge of adulthood. His fellow cashier, Stokesie, is twenty-two, married, with two young children. The store is managed by a much older man named Lengel, a friend of Sammy’s parents. The other characters include a customer at Sammy’s checkout slot and three teenage girls in bathing suits. It is an altercation in the aisles of the store between Lengel, the manager, and the three girls that forces Sammy to face his inner conflict and make a life changing decision.

Updike implies rather than spells out Sammy’s conflict. Sammy is nineteen, almost a man, but as yet without a man’s responsibilities. If Sammy stays in town, we can easily imagine he will soon be in the same situation as Stokesie, who has wife and two children to take care of. Sammy and Stokesie have good jobs, probably among the best the small town has to offer. If Stokesie were to quit his job, he would be abdicating his responsibilities and letting his family down. In the view of the town, such an action would probably be considered madness. For him, the chance to make a radical change in his life’s course has probably passed. Sammy, on the other hand, has a window of opportunity, a short period between youth and adulthood, during which, if he has the courage and the will, he can choose another path.

The A&P sits at the center of town. From the front door, Sammy can see two real estate offices, the bank, and the Congregational church. Lengel is not just the manager, he is a Sunday school teacher, a friend of Sammy’s parents, the reason Sammy has the job—in short, he represents the town and its values. Lengel also represents Sammy’s distant future, the best he might achieve, if he stays in town. When he looks at Lengel, he sees not only the town, but an image of himself as he might be thirty years in the future.

The three girls are not residents of the town, merely vacationers from a wider world that exists somewhere beyond the imagination of most of the townspeople. Although the summer colony (a beach resort) is only five miles away, the two worlds, the town and resort, do not often collide. Sammy claims there are people in town that haven’t seen the ocean for twenty years and that the women from town would never come into the store in just their bathing suits, and even if they did no one would notice. He describes them in an unflattering light—“women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs.” First and foremost, Sammy is an adolescent boy, attracted and distracted by the girl’s sexuality, but there is something else here, too, something that defines Sammy’s conflict.

The girls represent the wider world, a world of greater possibilities, one not bound by the rules and conventions of a provincial small town. They don’t come into the store dressed in bathing suits because they are daring. They come dressed that way because it never occurred to them that it might not be appropriate. The contrast between the two worlds, the one that Sammy lives in and the one just outside his reach, couldn’t be more stark. On the one hand, Sammy has a good job and a future in the small town; on the other, he dreams of wider horizons and greater possibilities. This is his conflict.

When Lengel (the town) confronts the girls (the outside world) about the way they are dressed, Sammy has to decide in which world he will live. This confrontation is the story’s “complication”—the event that forces Sammy to face and resolve his inner conflict. When Lengel emerges from his office and says, “Girls, this isn’t the beach,” it isn’t so much Queenie’s response but her voice itself that transports Sammy into the world outside the town. He tells us he “slid down that voice into her living room.” He then imagines a soirée her family might be having and contrasts it to his parent’s life. Meantime, Lengel is telling the girls that “we [the town] want you decently dressed when you come in here.”

At this point the confrontation escalates. “We are decent,” Queenie replies, and we get the sense she believes it. This is the exact moment of the collision between the two worlds, and Sammy, just a few feet away in his check-out stall, can feel the reverberations.

A moment later, Sammy announces, “I quit.” Of course, he hopes the girls, who are hurrying out the door, will stop and notice and that he will become their hero, but this proclamation has little to do with the girls themselves. It is Sammy choosing this moment to change his life forever. Lengel, of course, tries to reason with him. We can imagine Lengel feels that Sammy, by quitting, is rejecting everything he stands for and believes. He tells Sammy, “You’ll feel this for the rest of your life.” Sammy knows this to be true, but it doesn’t alter his path. This is his “moment of change,” a decision he has made that will alter everything that comes after.

We don’t know what comes next for Sammy. The story ends with Sammy acknowledging that everything will different, and harder, for him from now on. Clearly, he did not make the easy choice. We can imagine, though, that he leaves his small town for the larger world outside, that he moves to New York. We can even speculate that he eventually looks back on this moment and writes a short story about the moment his life changed its course forever.