Winners Sometimes Quit
Try and remember what it was like to be a teenager. The short story “A&P” tells the coming of age story of a nineteen year old boy named Sammy. Sammy has unknowingly placed himself into a situation that many small town adolescents often fall victim to. Sammy has a dead end job, and he feels as though he will be stuck working at the local “A&P” while life passes him by. This is until a chance encounter with three young female customers changes his course from mini vans and diapers to a welcomed new and uncertain future. After a close examination of the text, Sammy doesn’t quit his job because of the girls, he quits knowing that a dead end job is not what he is meant for.
Sammy is a normal teenage boy in many aspects, loves girls, is kind of a dreamer with a very vivid imagination, and is very defiant when it comes to authority. But in many ways Sammy is not the typical small town teen. Sammy is mature enough to understand the reality of his surroundings. The way he talks about the patrons shopping in his store are the thoughts of someone with a firm grip on how the world really works. Sammy talks about one shopper that is moving through his line, “She’s one of these cash-register-watchers, .....She’d been watching cash registers for fifty years and probably never seen a mistake before”. (Updike, 16) Those are not the words of someone that is happy with their job, having to constantly deal with over barring customers like her. He despises them so much that he refers to them as sheep. Following the crowd is not what Sammy is about.
Sammy makes it blatantly obvious that he is not very experienced with the opposite sex. Even though his descriptions of the girls are very creative, but not too bold, he seems to have at least one misconception about girls. Sammy offers this comment “You never know for sure how girls’ minds work; do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?”(16) This just proves he has never been in a close relationship with a female.
Sammy has an amazing eye for detail and no matter how taboo the subject, he manages to get his point across without seeming too offensive. When speaking of the three young women, he takes on the task of describing each girl in great detail and even manages to slip in which one he prefers. Sammy utters “She was the Queen.”(16) A small amount o...
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...itionally held by society. People that do this usually have a lot of trouble in life and the narrator recognizes this in the story's closing line. He accepts that and obviously he feels that going through the type of trouble quitting his job and making this decision will cause him are preferable to the alternative, which is to accept the rules and expectations of society, which he doesn't like.” (Rex 1) This statement is completely incorrect. Sammy is the essence of what makes this country great. He’s not rejecting society or religion, he is striving to be independent and be apart of society on his own terms. Sammy is looking for who he is, and anything worth having is worth fighting for. Sammy doesn’t quit his job to impress some girls, he quits to stop depending on others and find is own path trough life.
Works Cited
Rex, Terry. Rev. of “A&P” John Updike. 2001. 25 March 2005. http://quinnell.us/literature/reviews/story2.html
Updike, John. “A&P” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 4th ed. New York: Longman, 2005. 15-21.
Sammy is a 19-year-old boy conveying a cocky but cute male attitude. He describes three girls entering the A & P, setting the tone of the story. "In walk these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. There was this chunky one, with the two piece-it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale...there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed righ...
In "A&P" Sammy changes from an immature teenager to a person who takes a stand for what he believes is wrong which is reflected in Sammy's words and actions. This paper is composed of three paragraphs. The first paragraph deals with the immature Sammy, the second concentrates on Sammy's beginning his maturing process, and the last focuses on his decision to take a stand no matter what the consequences are.
In the final analysis, it would seem that the most obvious explanation for why Sammy quits his job--the one that he implies--is actually the least plausible. While Sammy would like to portray himself as the fearless defender of the delicate sensibilities of innocent girls, the reality is that Sammy's motives in quitting have far more to do with his own sensibilities than with those of the three girls.
Now that Sammy has chosen to become a juvenile delinquent, he realizes "how hard the world was going to be" for him in the future. He has left a life of safety and direction for one of the complete opposite, and he must be willing to accept the responsibilities of his actions, no matter the consequences.
He was involuntarily pushed into the meaning and concept of being an adult. “His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he’d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” (Updike 162) Sammy was a youthful young boy whose actions did not bother him as they did not seem to affect the people around him. However, the tough lesson that he learned on this day was a realization that his actions speak just as loud as his
As the student begins his essay, he points out that Sammy is part of the lower class structure. He is an “eighteen-year-old boy who is working as a checkout clerk in an A&P in a small New England town five miles from the beach” (2191). While working an afternoon shift on Thursday, he notices “these girls in nothing but bathing suits” (2191) enter the store. It is in this scene that the student begins to identify the differences between the group of girls and Sammy.
This story represents a coming-of-age for Sammy. Though it takes place over the period of a few minutes, it represents a much larger process of maturation. From the time the girls enter the grocery store, to the moment they leave, you can see changes in Sammy. At first, he sees only the physicality of the girls: how they look and what they are wearing, seem to be his only observations. As the story progresses, he notices the interactions between the girls, and he even determines the hierarchy of the small dynamic. He observes their actions and how they affect the other patrons of the business. Rather, how the other people view the girl's actions. His thought process is maturing and he starts to see things as an adult might see them.
I quit! These words can be attached to so many things in life. At times in life things seem to be different then they really are, for instance the thrill and the excitement of having a summer job or even successfully getting a first job. There are certain moments in a person’s life that will always have an impact on them one could call this a definitive moment or an epiphany. In the short story A&P by John Updike the main character Sammy has an epiphany in that he realizes that a moral line has been crossed in his working environment.
John Updike’s “A&P” is a short story about a nineteen year old boy during the 1960’s that has a summer job at the local A&P grocery. The main character in the story, Sammy, realizes that life isn’t always fair and that sometimes a person makes decisions that he will regret. Sammy sees that life doesn’t always go as planned when three young girls in bathing suits walk in and his manager Lengel gives them a hard time, and he comes to term with that sometimes you make bad decisions.
At the beginning of the story Sammy complains about an older woman, a fifty-year-old "witch" with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, who is waiting to check out her groceries. She gets annoyed with Sammy because he is too busy drooling over the young flesh which has just walked in the door (Updike 1026). The first half-naked girl who walks into the A&P and catches Sammy’s eye is a chunky girl with a two-piece plaid bathing suit on that showed off her "sweet broad soft-looking can" (Updike l026). As if staring at this girl’s backside wasn’t enough, Sammy also noticed "those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit" (Updike 1026).
Updike, John. “A&P.” Literature Craft and Voice. Ed. Nicholas Delbanco and Alan Cheuse. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw, 2013. 141-145. Print.
“Sammy wishes to quit, but he resists doing so because his parents would regard his decision as 'the sad part of the story'” (Thompson 215). Sammy points out that he thinks of quitting his job many times during the story, subtle as they are, he begins with the observation of quitting during the summer rather the winter and the part where he has mentioned “the sad part of the story” (Up...
Have you ever experienced a day where nothing goes right? The story “A&P” written by John Updike is one of a teenage boy named Sammy who quits his job in hope of impressing some girls --- only to find they neither cared nor listened. “Miss Brill” written by Katherine Mansfield is a story about an elderly woman named Miss Brill who goes to the park to observe people; her evening is ruined when some kids make fun of the way she 's dressed. Miss Brill and Sammy started their day motivated, as the stories went on their moods shifted because their actions were affected by other people 's opinions. But sad endings don 't always have to be sad, there 's a lot a reader can learn from them. Sad endings are more memorable than other endings because there is a feeling of uneasiness left for the reader. It is also more realistic that people don’t have a perfect day or the hero gets what they wanted. Updike and Mansfield use sad endings to further the theme of disappointment.
As the story goes, Romulus and Remus were twins, abandoned by their mother as babies, and put into a basket which was placed into the Tiber River. The basket landed and the twins were discovered by a female wolf. The wolf nursed the babies until they were found by a shepherd who lived nearby. The shepherd raised the twins as his own, although they were said to be unruly and obnoxious. When Romulus and Remus became adults, they decided to build a city where the wolf had found them. The brothers fought over everything, including where the site should be and what to name it. Eventually, Remus was accidentally killed by his brother, Romulus, who became the sole founder of the new city and he gave his name to it (Daning) Rome, whose founding date is said to be April 2,1 753 BC. (Carandini)
...up on Stokesie like sheep, Engel explains that policy insists that shoulders must be covered. Policy is what the kingpins want. What others want is juvenile delinquency. Like a champ Sammy throws in the towel. He watched as 3 girls bucked the norm and alternately was confident enough to quit altogether. They get away from him and his feet are carrying him to the place of his residence rather than a car, reserved for higher classes. He ends with the thought how hard the world was to be to me hereafter. Sammy?s variety of verbal simulations and creations for the reader reveal the social and economic classes of basic society. The adults like animals, the attractive women- analyzed on a pedestal in full description and personification, employees get harped on too. Stoksie was a little to ambitious for a bagger, and management was regarded like the rest of the animals.