John Updike's "A&p" "A&p," by John Updike

John Updike's "A&P" "A&P," by John Updike is a short story that in its few pages, says more about love, desire and naivety than many works can in hundreds. The story centers on a seemingly-teenage boy, Sammy, who spends his summer working at a local A&P owned by a family friend.

Sammy appears to be a hard-worker, going about his job with ease and precision despite the monotony of the situation, until one day when a group of girls walks into the store -- and everything changes.

In viewing Sammy's character development in the short time over which the story takes place, in conjunction with the setting of the story and the theme of desire, readers are able to place themselves into Sammy's shoes and into a mindset in which summer love and desire seem to mean more than anything else the world has to offer. The setting of the story does so much to offer a backdrop for the plot of Updike's work.

The A&P exists in stark contrast to the beach that awaits them not so far away. Updike writes, "Our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point. we're right in the middle of town. And there's people in this town [who] haven't seen the ocean for twenty years" (Updike 1112).

In presenting this setting, Updike is able to starkly contrast the worlds of youth and the longing for summer -- the beach, the love, and all that goes with it, and the reality of the town -- structured, boring, and too real for any youth's liking. Sammy, in a nod to youth and rebellion, is characterized as turning from a boy to a man in the work's few pages, driven by the desire he has for the "queen bee" described within the text.

The reader can garner that Sammy has always been a good worker, despite his longing to be anywhere but the A&P during the summer, and his impulsiveness to quit at the end of the story shows much for how naive he truly is to the ways of the world despite his own ideas of his rebellion and maturity. Sammy's boss, Lengel says, "Sammy, you don't want to do this to your Mom and Dad," upon the boy's quitting. "It's true.

I don't" is Sammy's reply, but his character shift has sent him into impulsive action to quit and find the girl he's meant to be with (Updike 1114). As seen in Sammy's characterization, the theme of desire does much to drive the plot to its ultimate end. As he watches the girl, dressed only in a pink bikini with the straps pulled down -- despite the A&P's central location within the town -- Sammy begins to desire her even more.

As he watches her, he takes her in fully, and by the time she checks out at the register, he's in quite deep. Sammy takes her money and hands her change pining for her, "I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm. all the time thinking" (Updike 1113).

"A&P" does much to offer a slice of the summer and all the emotions it brings with it into the literary world. So many readers can resonate with the plot-line: a boy, coming in to his own, desperate to find that certain something or someone who can give his summer -- or his life.