John Delaway
ENC1102
Professor McGuirk
May 20th, 2013
Judging by the way Sammy speaks; he views himself as an ordinary guy, just trying to get by in the world just like everyone else but is a bit more fortunate than others. His educational level is more advanced than what most people in that era would have had. For example, his father had the connections to get him the job at the supermarket which can be assumed that he is from a higher class level family. This point makes it clear when he tells the manager of A & P that he wants to quit. The manager goes on to say that he would not want to make that decision and upset his father. What proves to be inessential in the first eleven paragraphs is the extended detail about the girls walking around the supermarket. I don’t think that there is enough material to actually understand the true story of what is actually going on. The only known fact is that three girls come into the store and Sammy, who seems to be infatuated with one of them, is entertained by the fact of how they come into the store. I think any other character would have approached this material in a less interested manner and would have been blunter about what they had seen at the store while they were shopping and the scene that had occurred between Sammy and his manager. Sammy is an experienced “girl watcher” by how he analyzes every detail about the girls. For example, he quotes “The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs.” This very clearly states how he has analyzed a lot of girls’ bodies and every type that he has come across. What he thinks he knows about most girls is that he thinks they are pleasant, innocent, and carefree.
Sammy says he quits so abruptly because I think he realizes that his job was just such an uptight place that he didn’t want to work there. He saw how his manager gave those girls such a hard time and even that lady with the rouge gave him a hard time about her purchases that he just didn’t want to be in a place like that. I believe he was just fed up with that crowd. Why he says that the world is going to be hard to him after his experience with A & P is probably because he realizes that no job is perfect, easy, or carefree. There’s always going to be people you encounter that will give you a hard time and you have to deal with it. Also, the fact that his father got him the job there and that he quit his one and only job will make it that much harder for him personally to find another job, either by convincing his father to help him or whether he does it on his own. I would say that Updike’s story of A & P is more of a tragedy. The way he speaks about the old lady and how she gave him a hard time, you could see that he didn’t want to deal with her and quickly moved to get her out of his face. Also, the whole conversation he had with his boss and how the mood dramatically changed from his infatuation with the girls in one scene to his abrupt answer to quitting. In the end, he knew his own consequences of quitting and what was going to occur afterwards. He quotes, after his boss says he doesn’t want to do that to his mom and dad, “It's true, I don't. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.”