¶ … stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter." This final line of John Updike's short story "A&P" reveals the importance of point-of-view to the story. The narrator is a teenager working in a grocery store, the titular A&P supermarket, as a summer job. He asserts his individuality and self-confidence during a defining incident in the story, in which he is asked either to keep his mouth shut and therefore keep his job; or to speak up on behalf of some girls who is boss embarrassed. The precipitating incident reveals much about the speaker's character, and the story would have been completely different if it were told from the point-of-view of the girls or of Lengel, the store manager. "A&P" is a coming of age story, and the first person point-of-view allows the reader to understand an adolescent's perspective of issues like social norms and authority. An adolescent point-of-view distinguishes the younger generation's perspective on values and norms from that of the older generations. For example, the narrator notes, "now here comes the sad part of the story,...

After all, his parents were longtime friends with Lengel. This establishes a generation gap between the narrator, on the one hand, and the parents and Lengel on the other. A generation gap creates vastly different values and norms related to morality and authority, which are two themes that are explored by Updike in "A&P." The narrator is suggesting that if it were his mother or father working at the supermarket, they would have reacted completely differently to the situation. The story could have been told from Lengel's perspective, which would have offered a whole new meaning to the incident of the girls wearing bathing suits in the store. Told from Lengel's perspective, the reader would have come away thinking that it was a message about public decency and maintaining decorum. Moreover, the reader would have viewed the young kid as being immature and rash by quitting his job.
Instead, the narrator quits knowing that there are possibly better things on the horizon…