Story questions A&P and Cathedral
A&P
1. Sammy is a 19 year old boy with raging hormones which affects him by quitting his job in order to try and catch the attention of Queenie and her friends.
2. The customers in the store are regular people wearing normal clothes and Queenie and her friends stand out because they are wearing bathing suits inside the store.
3. Sammy likes their bodies, Queenies leadership and how they move.
4. Yes. She is a stock character because they name her Queenie because she is the leader/queen of the small group and because of what she was buying, painting her as a sort of upper class person.
5. Customers are expected to wear shoes and shirts for service. Queenie and her friends are in the store in just their bathing suits therefore violating the rules of the store.
6. The supermarket is vital to the story because the girls would have to be in a place where such an outfit would not be allowed for what they were going to do which was to shop for an item.
7. Sammy seemed to exaggerate the appearance of the girls. If the story had been told by Lengel then the story might have been duller.
8. Sammy’s primary motive was to get the attention of Queenie and the girls. The other motive was to go through with what he had already started and he did not want to be seen as someone to just give in.
Cathedral
1. The narrator is never introduced by name but he is referred to as bub by Robert. We know that the narrator is a bit of a loner but he has a wife. The impending visit disturbs him because he does not know the man at all and he is going to go and spend the night at his home.
2. Her displeasure comes because of how the narrator acts with the blind man, constantly bothering them. It shows that the wife is a more caring person than the narrator. It shows that the narrator is distracting.
3. The wife left her first husband because she was unhappy about moving all the time and losing the friends she would make all the time, she was so unhappy that she tried committing suicide. The qualities that the narrator might have that made her marry him was that she could now stay in one place and the narrator also seemed to admire his wife very much.
4. The narrator’s wife is so devoted to the blind man because he is the one person she has kept in touch with over the years. She gains a person to talk with as well as a vent to whatever problems she is facing.
5. The experience is important because just as how the narrator drew the cathedral he gained a better understanding of how to see without using his eyes.
6. The narrator is unable to explain the cathedral because he has probably never been asked to describe something so intricate so he stays fixated in its most prominent features such as its height. His inability to describe the cathedral reveals that he is not fixated on describing the cathedral.
7. The blind man tells him to close his eyes while drawing so that he may experience something beyond sight. The blind man hopes to teach the narrator that you can see without being able to see. The narrator is able to see the cathedral with his eyes shut, he was able to feel like he was no longer in his home.
8. To the blind man the cathedral symbolizes true sight to see what is beyond the surface. The cathedral symbolizes the discovery of a new kind of sense he is now able to see as how Robert sees.