Essays on Queenie

• Central character: Sammy, the nineteen years old who works as a shop assistant at the checkout line at the shop, called A&P that is situated in a small New England town. • Other characters: Queenie, a charming young lady who entered the shop in a bathing suit. It is not her real name, Sammy has given her that nickname. She was accompanied with two girlfriends.The girl nicknamed Plaid and the second Big Tall Goony-Goony. Lengel who works as a manager of the A&P, the one who embarrassed girls and Stokesie the checkout clerk, who is married and have two children.

• Setting: The A&P grocery store is in the center of the town, far from the beach.

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Abstract

Sammy works at a small town grocery store located near the beach as a cashier. He’s nineteen years old. While he’s at work, three girls walk into the store wearing bathing suits. Sammy as well as others in the store are distracted by the naked flesh. The three girls, headed by Queenie, are well aware of the male gaze. Towards the end of the story, Lengel, the manager of the store, tells Queenie that they are inappropriately dressed. At this instant, Sammy quits his job. He realizes that life is going to hard for him thereafter. Examine ...

The story ‘A & P’ by John Updike was first published in The New Yorker on July 22, 1961. Even now, fifty years on, it remains, for all its brevity, his most widely anthologized short story and, because of that, one of his most widely read. This paper will attempt to analyze the appeal of ‘A &P’ and reach a conclusion about why it continues to be read with such interest and so widely. Aspects of the way the story is written are important, but equally important, as we shall see, is the date of publication. The story ...