Play From Our Text Functions

¶ … Play From Our Text Functions as Literature

Irony and characterization in the adolescent perspective of John Updike's "A&P

What makes particular works of literature crafted and timeless literary creations, rather than forgettable 'stories?' On the surface John Updike's "A&P" is told in the narrative voice of a teenage retail clerk and could be as ordinary as a story featured in Seventeen magazine. The plot, as it exists, is forgettable, and familiar to anyone who has worked in a menial job. Sammy, the first-person narrator, is a grocery store clerk in a small, seaside town. Sammy is middle-class but many of the summer people are of the 'upper class.' Three barefoot girls in bathing suits, evidently some of the wealthy 'summer people' stop at the a&P to buy some herring snacks in a jar. They are reprimanded by the store's manager, and Sammy quits in protest. However, it is only because Updike is such a skilled writer that the reader can see himself in Sammy's frustrated ambitions and only half-awakened sexual urges. Updike makes the mundane universal, humorous, and compelling.

The story's involving nature is partially due to Sammy's character. Although Updike presents Sammy as a nineteen-year-old adolescent, Sammy is also witty and observant. Of one of the patrons he says: "By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me a little snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem," as she shows a witch-like anger at him for ringing up her order wrong the first time (Updike 468). Sammy is ignorant, and reveals his age in some of his comments: "You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar)? (Updike 469). But Sammy is also filled with sad, poignant longing for something better than life as a cashier. Of one of his fellow employees he observes: "Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April" (Updike 469). Clearly Sammy is afraid: Sammy doesn't want to be like Stokesie, married, with children, and like his own parents who use glasses with "They'll Do it Every Time" cartoons stenciled on them to serve Schlitz to visitors. Instead, he wants to be with the girls, eating herring snacks with their parents at the fantasy party he envisions, where men in ice-cream white coats serve olives and real cocktails poolside.

It is easy to sympathize with Sammy, given that the repressive nature of society he perceives around him seems very real. The entire store is transfixed by the sight of the girls: "She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they all three of them went up the cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-rice-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft drinks- crackers-and- cookies aisle" (Updike 468). It is absurd how much the other patrons care about what the girls are wearing, but also absurd how much moral weight Sammy gives to these ordinary girls' ambling march through the aisles.

Because of his own perspective as a frustrated grocery store clerk, Sammy sees the girls as liberating the town, shocking the 'bums' who buy inexplicable amounts of pineapple juice (in another one of his funny asides). Sammy is filled with sexual desire, especially at 'the queen' the prettiest and most dominant girl, who walks with her straps down and pays for the snacks with a bill between her breasts. But he also projects higher, chivalric moral aspirations upon the girls: he wants to defend them, even if he cannot 'have' them.