Comparative analysis of identity and journey in "A&P" and "Farewell to Manzanar

¶ … John Updike's "A&P" Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's "Double Impulse,'

Proper Identification

Upon first glance, there does not appear to be a wealth of similarities between the short story of John Updike, "A&P," and that of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, which is entitled "Double Impulse" and is excerpted from her memoir called Farewell to Manzanar. The former details a teenage boy's all too brief encounter with a pair of scantily clad girls in a grocery store, while the latter is about the author's growing up in the United States during the time period when Japanese people were interred in the United States. However, upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that the central theme at the heart of each of these tales is the forming of one's identity largely through the journey of the events that takes place these stories. Houston slowly forges her identity, which is distinct from her traditional one in Japan and is decidedly American in context, whereas Sammy, the protagonist in the Updike's tale, comes into his own after abruptly quitting his job. In both stories, the protagonists essentially form their identities and complete their journeys to do so as a result of their reaction to negative events.

What turns out to eventually be a negative event for Sammy starts out as rather positive in the beginning of Updike's story. The young man is working at a grocery store on a boring afternoon in a boring town when three bathing suit clad girls pique his interest. One of the young women's bathing suits is not even all the way on, exposing her shoulders and other parts of her anatomy. However, Sammy is able to see the banality of his job, his town, and of the life he leads that intersects with both of these as insufficient when the manager, Lengel, embarrasses the young women about their attire, as the following quotation plainly indicates.

I fold the apron "Sammy" stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you've ever wondered. "You'll feel this for the rest of your life," Lengel says, and I know that's true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale and the machine whirs "pee-pull" and the drawer splats out (Updike).

This quotation demonstrates that the narrator has quit his job, rather impetuously, as something of a heroic gesture to protest how Lengel made one of the girls feel. It was during that moment, when Sammy felt "scrunchy inside," that he decided to assert his own independence and autonomy by quitting. Before this event he had largely conformed to the blandness of the town and his job that he constantly ridicules in his mind as he watches the girls. Yet it was due to the negativity caused by Lengel's embarrassing the girls, which Sammy himself felt, that he was willing to fully form his own identity as being incongruous with Lengel, the store he worked in, and the mores of the town he was in.

There is a similarity to a reaction of negativity that takes place in Houston's story. As a Japanese-American, her identity was largely torn between the view and conceptions of the land of her forefathers, Japan, and that of her current home, the United States. However, one of the key moments of Houston's story occurs when she is in sixth grade and is made to read a selection before the class. After doing so, she is greeted with a series of surprised faces from her classmates, who are visibly surprised, and some even shocked, that she can read in English. When one of her classmates even voices this reaction, the immediate and lingering effects of this incident on Houston prove to be one of the most formative for her journey to her identity, as the following quotation proves. "I was suddenly aware of what being of Japanese ancestry was going to be like. I would be seen as someone foreign, or as someone other than American, or perhaps not be seen at all" (Houston). This quotation indicates the negative perception with which Houston viewed this experience. In it, she has come to realize that the majority of people in America will have stereotypes and misconceptions about her due to her "Japanese ancestry." Following this quotation, the author makes virtually every attempt that she can to 'Americanize' herself, which is what the remainder of the short story largely details. This reaction is mostly out of Houston's need for acceptance from her peers and the environment in which she lives. Therefore, she becomes as involved as she can in that environment, by participating in activities in student government, sports, and in extracurricular and academic areas. To a certain extent, her need for acceptance is largely due to the negativity she experience at having people stereotype her when she read in the sixth grade.