Compare And Contrast A & P And An Ounce Of Cure

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Crazy in Love John Updike’s “A & P” and Alice Munro’s “An Ounce of Cure” are stories that show that young love make you crazy, both in how you view the other person and your actions. Both authors write fictional stories from the narrator’s point of view. Updike’s narrator is Sammy and Munro’s is a young girl and both cover what young love made them do. The stories do not coincide, but the narrators’ experiences are similar. In “A & P,” Sammy falls in love at first sight with a girl who walks into the grocery store he is working at. He becomes infatuated with how she looks in her bathing suit. When she and her friends are scolded by the store’s manager for indecency, Sammy impulsively quits his job to be her unsuspected hero. In “An Ounce of …show more content…

When Sammy first sees the girl in the bathing suit, he refers to her as “Queenie.” Her bathing suits straps are off her shoulders and he thinks to himself “with the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane from the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal titled in the light” (Updike 142). His description of Queenie is very angelic, and he sees no imperfections in her. In Munro’s story, the girl goes into depth when describing her ex-boyfriend Martin Collingwood. When the girl sees Martin on stage playing the part of Darcy, she is “overcome with pain and alight at the sight of Mr. Darcy in white breeches, silk waistcoat, and sideburns” (Munro 154). On stage and in white, he is also angelic to the girl. In both of the stories the imagery of the narrators’ love interests is so thorough that shows the narrators are adolescences and how hypnotized someone can be when they first experience …show more content…

Sammy is so upset that his manager is rebuking the girl in the bathing suit that he quits his job on the spot. Knowing that his manager “made that pretty girl blush makes [him] feel so scrunchy inside” that he takes off his uniform (Updike 144). The girl has left the store and is not watching him, but his feeling for her are so strong that he does not want to work at the store. Although he knows his parents will be mad at him and that he knows the world is going to be hard, he follows through with his decision even though it affects his future. In Munro’s story, the girl is so miserable without Martin that she has “an impulse to shallow all the aspirins in the bathroom cachinnate” and “decide[s] to get drunk” (Munro 154, 155). The girl comes from a strict and responsible family that never advocated for drugs or alcohol, but because of young love she has thoughts of killing herself and getting drunk while babysitting. She does plead her nativity of alcohol, but she knew that both the aspirins and the alcohol would make her feel differently and hopefully, differently about Martin. She too knew her decisions would her affect her futures, but she was impartial to being a disappointment to her mother, the talk of the school and an unfixable reputation as a babysitter. Young love is so strong that it results in impulsive decisions that result in

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