John Updike’s story ‘A & P’ was first appeared in ‘The New Yorker’ on July 22, 1961. Even now, fifty years later, it still is, despite its extreme brevity, perhaps even because of it, his most frequently anthologized short story and, one might assume, one of his most appreciated and valued. It is a story in which plot, point of view and character are intermingled.
The plot is very simple. Three scantily clad young women arrive at the local A & P, and cause a stir because they are dressed for the beach. The other shoppers are shocked, but the male shop assistants ogle and leer at the three girls. Just as the girls reach the till, the manager Lengel enters the supermarket and reprimands the girls for the way they are dressed, arguing that what is acceptable on the beach is not acceptable in this small town supermarket. Sammy, the shop assistant who narrates the story, quits on the spot in protest at Lengel’s treatment of the girls. Sammy just walks out of the shop without looking back.
The key to the plot, though, is the point of view and the development of Sammy’s character. The point of view is exclusively Sammy’s – he tells the story. The opening sentence– “In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.” (Updike 1) establishes Sammy’s chatty, vernacular and colloquial tone. The present tense (“walks”) and Sammy’s misuse of the demonstrative pronoun (“these”) immediately gives the story immediacy and intimacy through Updike’s creation of Sammy’s voice. This first person narration is said to be typical of much American fiction, according to Zwinkler (189)
In American fiction, far more than in its British counterpart, the first-person narrative holds sway. British writers of fiction seem to prefer to exercise control as an omniscient narrator; American writers, by contrast, generally prefer to give a voice to their protagonist – thus ensuring a sense of authenticity and also of enshrining in their style the key theme of individualism fighting against the conformity imposed by society.
The readers come to understand, to sympathize and to empathize with Sammy because we see things from Sammy’s view point. Because of this point of view– it is difficult not to agree with Sammy that Lengel as being trivial and unpleasantly rude to the girls, and it is hard not to see the attitudes of the “sheep”, as Sammy calls them, in the A &P as narrow-minded, conventional and conformist, because Sammy’s point of view is so friendly, honest and engaging. Sammy and Stokesie are presented with warm and cheerful humor. Updike shows their exaggerated reactions and humorous responses as they gaze in lust at the three girls:
“Oh Daddy,” Stokesie said beside me. “I feel so faint”
“Darling,” I said. “Hold me tight.” (Updike 3)
This relaxed and sexually playful exchange is in complete contrast to Lengel’s angrily petty and narrowly conformist reaction to the girls. Sammy is as critical of his town as he is of Lengel. Sammy’s description of his home town is deeply dismissive. He give us a critical view of small town America – which he presents as full of small hopes and tiny ambitions, not just trivial regulations about what you cannot wear in the A & P. At one point he describes the position of the A& P store in the town:
As I say, we’re right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and the three real-estate offices and about twenty-seven free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It’s not as if we’re on the cape; we’re north of Boston and there’s people in this town haven’t seen the ocean for twenty years. (Updike 4)
“Haven’t seen the ocean for twenty years” – although we are also told they are only five miles from the nearest beach!
His attitude to the townspeople is also critical and we can understand the excitement that the visit of the three girls to the supermarket creates. The reader can see Sammy’s attitude on the first page when he describes the woman who is at the till as the three girls enter:
She’s one of those cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it would make her day to trip me up. (Updike 1)
“If she’d been born at the right time, they would have burned he rover in Salem” (Updike 1) – Sammy tells us. His view of the other shoppers in the A & P also reveals a scathing contempt. The others shoppers quite clearly disapprove of the way the girls are dressed: Sammy says of them: “You could see them, when Queenie’s white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and they pushed on.” (Updike 3) And the sight of the girls’ bare flesh, which inflames Sammy and Stokesie so much, has the opposite effect on the shoppers: “…there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct.” (Updike 3)
And the “sheep” congregate expectantly at the end of the story to hear the conversation and see the confrontation that Lengel as with the girls. (Updike 6) Sammy lives in a narrow-minded, conventional town with conformist, narrow-minded people. At the end of this story when the girls have gone and Sammy is in the parking lot
There wasn’t anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn’t get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. (Updike 7)
This is the destiny that Sammy is trying to avoid – conformity – fatherhood in this town. He knows that Stokesie is trapped:
Skokie’s married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already….he thinks he’s going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it’s called the Great Alexnadrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something. (Updike 3)
Sammy is rebelling against his destiny, and, in so doing, he conforms to the patterns established in so many American novels and stories written over the centuries:
The archetypal reaction of the rebel American protagonist faced with social conformity is to leave, to turn his back, to walk away, in an attempt to preserve his freedom and his integrity. (Poirier 123)
Therefore, Sammy’s decision to quit makes him a typical American hero. Stokesie, the “sheep”, the “house-slaves”, Lengel – all these represent the things that Sammy may become if he does not do something now.
Sammy has changed and developed in the course of the story. It is clear from Sammy’s description that he finds Queenie’s appearance sexually arousing and it is a story in which the main character, Sammy, comes of age and reaches a new maturity: As Werlock (1) argues:
Initially Sammy joined Stokesie in leering at the girls; though his interest in Queenie’s flesh never wanes, he experiences a turning point when he observes the butcher sizing up the girls.
Or as Sammy himself says:
All that was left for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn’t help it. (Updike 4)
This is the turning point of the story – when Sammy sees the middle aged butcher leering at the girls and feels sorry for them. In this moment we see the germ of what will happen at the end when he quits in protest over Lengel’s treatment of the girls.
Sammy is so hurt by Lengel’s rudeness to the girls that he quits his job, removes his apron and bow tie, and saunters out of the shop. He feels so strongly that the manager has embarrassed the girls for such a petty thing, and that such public humiliation of them was cruel, unnecessary and unkind. When Sammy saunters out of the A & P the girls have disappeared, but his act of quitting still demonstrates immense integrity and a rebellion against conformity that the “sheep”, the “house-slaves”, and Lengel all represent. As Werlock (1) puts it:
Sammy’s quitting may be motivated by a combination of lust, admiration of Queenie's social status and sentimental romanticism, but his gesture does not lack principle and quickly assumes more serious overtones.
And so this story becomes, from its very ordinary beginnings in an A & P supermarket, a tale of moral choice integrity, and an attack on the conformity of the society of the “sheep” of small town America.
Works Cited
Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere. 1966. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Print.
Updike, John, ‘A & P.’ The New Yorker, July 22, 1961. Web.
Werlock, James P. (2010). The Facts on File: Companion to the American Short Story, Volume Two. 2010. New York: Infobase Publishing. Print.
Zwinkler, Martin. The American Rebellion: Lone Voices against Conformity. 2004. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
