This essay compares Richard Wright's "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" and John Updike's "A&P" to examine how each story portrays adolescent boys who misunderstand what authentic manhood requires. Through close readings of tone, imagery, and language, the essay argues that Dave and Sammy pursue misguided symbols of maturity — a gun and the approval of girls, respectively — and that their impulsive actions ultimately set them further back on the path to adulthood. By the end of each story, neither boy achieves his goal, though both gain a modest degree of self-awareness about how much they still have to learn.
The paper demonstrates sustained parallel analysis: rather than treating each story separately, it consistently pairs the two texts within a single interpretive framework. Each literary device — tone, imagery, language — becomes a shared lens through which both protagonists are evaluated simultaneously, reinforcing the comparative thesis throughout.
The essay opens with a thesis paragraph that introduces both stories and the central argument. Three body paragraphs follow, each organized around a single literary element (tone, imagery, language) applied to both texts. A transitional paragraph synthesizes the boys' shared misconceptions before a brief conclusion acknowledges their limited but real growth. Works Cited entries close the paper in MLA format.
Authentic manhood is something that cannot be bought or achieved through a string of mindless actions. Two stories that emphasize this concept are Richard Wright's The Man Who Was Almost a Man and John Updike's A&P. Through tone, imagery, and language, each author demonstrates how his protagonist cannot yet be a man because he still has so many lessons to learn. Dave and Sammy are both under the impression that manhood can be reached through a series of rather senseless actions. For Dave, that action is possessing a gun; for Sammy, it is receiving the approval of girls. At the end of each story, neither boy achieves his goal — instead, each only sets himself back in his journey toward manhood, because there are consequences for every action.
Each story relies on its tone to establish meaning. Wright and Updike are both straightforward in presenting information for the reader to decipher. Both stories are ironic in that each young man acts on a notion he believes will make him a man. In The Man Who Was Almost a Man, Dave believes that simply owning a gun will make him more mature. He hopes his mother will let him "buy one when she gits mah pay from ol man Hawkins... Ahma beg her t gimme some money... Ah mol enough to hava gun" (Wright 1470). This passage reveals just how childish Dave actually is: he requires his mother's approval, and he reasons that the only way to obtain the gun is through begging rather than through any display of his own character.
In A&P, Sammy genuinely believes that the way he quits his job will somehow improve his life — especially in the eyes of the girls. His hope is that they heard him and that he will become "their unsuspected hero" (Updike 1420). What Sammy fails to consider is how his life will change regardless of whether the girls noticed. In both cases, the bare facts are sufficient to reveal the immaturity of these boys.
Each author also provides powerful imagery that reinforces the notion that neither boy is ready for adulthood. In The Man Who Was Almost a Man, Dave does not even fully understand what has happened after he fires the gun. The narration reads: "His hand was numb... The gun was at his feet. He did not quite know what had happened" (Wright 1475). He then looks at the gun "though it were a living thing" (1475) and proceeds to kick it because it nearly broke his arm. This moment clearly portrays a boy unprepared for manhood — one who does not know what to expect when a gun is fired.
In A&P, Updike uses the imagery of the store and its surroundings to convey the narrow scope of Sammy's world. Sammy describes the store as a "pinball machine" (Updike 1418) as he watches for the girls, illustrating how small his environment is relative to the town or the wider world. At the end of the story, as Sammy walks away from this place, he passes "bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement" (1421) — a mundane tableau that underscores how limited his known world truly is. These images successfully allow the reader to see both Dave and Sammy as boys rather than men.
Language becomes a significant element of both stories, revealing the boys and the worlds in which they live. The dialect in The Man Who Was Almost a Man gives a clear picture of Dave's social environment and, in doing so, adds additional weight to his desire to become a man. He wants to be respected in a community where African Americans work for white employers and where any meaningful sense of equality is absent. When Dave expresses his desire for respect, what he is really seeking is to be regarded as a man regardless of his race. The racial and social dimensions of Wright's fiction thus give Dave's quest for manhood a significance that extends well beyond adolescent posturing.
Real manhood becomes a fleeting dream for Dave and Sammy, two boys who want so badly to be grown up that they behave foolishly in pursuit of it. They both act impulsively, and in doing so they only draw attention to the fact that they are not yet ready for manhood. However, both boys can acknowledge that they have grown up at least a little, having recognized that there is far more to being a man than what they had originally imagined.
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