Setting Analysis of John Updike's

Setting Analysis of John Updike's short story "A&P" The title of John Updike's short story "A&P" refers to this story's setting in the sense of its immediate, physical place.

In other words, the story is about a young man who works in a supermarket, and the story is set in an "A&P," part of a commercial chain of supermarkets during an indeterminate contemporary time, probably around the early 1960's when Updike first authored "A&P." However, the notion of a story's setting involves more than simply the tale's geographic location in an immediate sense.

It also includes the short story's atmosphere, and the relationship of the characters to a larger sense of "place, [in A&P, probably suburban New England in a resort community like Cape Cod] time, and even "weather and clothes." (Burroway, p.171) Or, in the case of "A&P" one might be tempted to add, the lack thereof of clothes, in the case of the girls that stalk the aisles of the air-conditioned store one summer afternoon.

Setting thus takes into consideration the different characters' emotional relationships with the place's setting, and how the characters feel about the place where they are located. For instance, Sammy, Updike's nineteen-year-old cashier and main protagonist feels much less positively about the store where he works, as opposed to, for instance the "cash-register watchers" who may regard catching poor cashiers like Sammy in an error as the highlight of their week.

Rather than a dreary place, to such exuberant housewives, the A&P might seem like a paradise of sales and opportunities to show their shopping prowess rather than a place where one labors for little thanks on a nice summer day. (Updike, p.204) If the story were narrated from the perspective of one of these rouged harridans, it would be a very different tale indeed, especially after Queenie and her crew passes through the store's doors.

The fact that it is summer is also a crucial aspect of the narrative, as this otherwise enclosed community is now subject to an onslaught of relatively more affluent outsiders. The 'queen' who traipses through the aisles of the store half-naked in her bathing suit, on an errand to buy herring snacks is part of these 'summer people.' Her purchase is an evident appetizer for a swishy cocktail party for her parents -- at least in the casher's fantasy of her life.

"All of a sudden I slid right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-creme coats and bow ties." His parents are of a different social and economic class; they are not of the summer crew.

"When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with 'They'll Do it Every Time' cartoons stenciled on." (Updike, p.208) Thus it is unlikely that girls of their 'class' would be in this suburban Boston community, unless it was summer, nor would Sammy feel so frustrated, being cooped up inside, were it not so nice outside -- and also the girls would not have been dressed so provocatively, were it not summer.

(Saldivar, p.1) The fact that the girls are in bathing suits in a supermarket highlights their sexuality.

Perhaps the most compelling definition of setting is provided, not by any literary theorist who might opine on the subject, but by Updike through the mouth of Sammy, "it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A&P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages," which flouts all conventional norms of expected attire and behavior.

(Updike, p.206) This is what makes the girls, however unconscious their sexuality; seem so radical in their stance as they transgress the norms of conventional behavior and attire in the store. "If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background," says Burroway.

(p.173) But Sammy's character is both commensurate with his setting -- he is of the same station and community year 'round as his supervisors at the supermarket, but he also sees himself, within, as above these other individuals, above his fellow cashiers and the shoppers he serves, even his parents because of his self-perception of himself as more intelligent and more cognizant of the fine things of life, as embodied by the girls who stalk the A&P that afternoon.

In contrast to his immediate setting, Sammy sees himself as more sophisticated and intelligent, and allies himself with the beauty and defiance he reads into the action of the girls, even if the girls themselves cannot 'read' him as such.

"Whether there is conflict between character and setting or the conflict takes place entirely in the foreground, within, between, or among the characters, the setting is important to our understanding of character type and of what to expect, as well as to the emotional value that arises from the conflict." (Burroway,.