John Updike
Analysis of Ian McEwan's "On John Updike" and John Updike's "The allet"
In an article meant to eulogize the late, great writer John Updike, Ian McEwan makes a statement that is confusing unless one understands Updike's background. McEwan says that "This most Lutheran of writers, driven by intellectual curiosity all his life, was troubled by science as others are troubled by God" (McEwan). The eulogizer makes the point that Updike was not troubled by God, but by the technology that had been increasing his confusion about the world he lived in. It is easy to see that the contention McEwan is making with relation to John Updike is that the author was comfortable with his conception of God through "long relationship" (McEwan), but he was uncomfortable with the change wrought in the world by an ever-increasing technology.
To reference this point McEwan uses the author himself, and an article/short story Updike…...
mlaWorks Cited
McEwan, Ian. "On John Updike." The New York Review of Books, 12 March, 2009. Web.
Updike, John. "The Wallet." Yankee Magazine, September 1985. Web.
John Updike's Rabbit, Run
John Updike: The author was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932, and he later attended Harvard University and also the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts, located in Oxford, England. He began his professional writing career by contributing poems, articles and book reviews to The New Yorker magazine (1955-1957). Updike, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1982 for Rabbit Is Rich, has written over 25 books. He is the father of four children, and lives in Massachusetts. It is believed that the central character in Updike's "Rabbit" series (four novels, beginning with Rabbit, Run), was a real-life basketball hero who hailed from Shillington, Pennsylvania, where Updike grew up.
Plot Summary: The central character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, is an unhappy middle class Pennsylvanian living in the 1950s. He is chained to nightmare jobs selling "MagiPeel Peelers" in supermarkets, and selling Toyotas, jobs that give him zero…...
mlaWorks Cited
Anderson, Donald R. "Eccles redux. (John Updike's Rabbit saga)." Journal of Modern
Literature 24 (2000): 327-338.
Greiner, Donald J. John Updike's Novels. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984.
Heddendorf, David. "Rabbit reread." The Southern Review 36 (2000):
Sammy's sexual attraction to the queen is also shown in this passage, "with the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and top of the head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light."
The story also demonstrates a teen's disdain for authority figures, usually older people, and their penchant for going against the rules and not conforming to the norms. Sammy's disdain for authority can be gleaned from the way he described a shopper, "She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows… if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem" ("A&P by John Updike"). It appears that for Sammy, older people and authority figures are enemies. On…...
mlaReference:
"A&P by John Updike." Tiger-Town. Tiger-Town, n.d. Web. 25 May 2010.
Because their shoulders are bare, they are disciplined by the manager for flaunting authority. Their rebellion is short and meaningless, but the cashier's rebellion is absolute, because he quits his job, but it is meaningless as well. Thus, Updike shows that teen rebellion is often misguided and does not accomplish anything in the end.
The conflict in the story is Jim's argument with his boss. He says, "You didn't have to embarrass them," and his boss replies, "It was they who were embarrassing us" (Updike 195). It is a very basic conflict between authority and freedom, and Sammy chooses freedom, because he knows that elementarily he is right. The girls caused no harm, and there was no need to call further attention to them. However, Sammy's conflict with his manager is much more permanent than the girl's conflict. They are already gone and forgotten, while Sammy is not, and may…...
mlaReferences
Updike, John. Pigeon Feathers, and Other Stories. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.
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…...
mlaWorks Cited
Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction. Fourth Edition. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
Saldivar, Toni. "The Art of John Updike's A&P." From Studies in Short Fiction. Retrieved by Questia.com 12 November 2004 at OFFID=se1& KEY=john_updikehttp://www.questia.com/Index.jsp?CRID=john_updike& ;
Updike, John. "A&P" From Point-of-View: An Anthology of Short Stories. Edited by John Moffett & Kenneth R. McElheny. New York: New American Library, 1966.
Father's Tears"
In his short story "My Father's Tears," author John Updike contrasts his childhood perceptions of his father's tears as the father sent his son away to college on the train with a present-day perspective. As an older man, the narrator now understands what seemed like sentimentality. The young narrator was merely impatient to grow up and was impatient with his father. The main point of the story is the inaccessibility of knowledge and the limited perspective of the young until it is too late. Although Updike's story is very much a product of its place and time -- a mid-20th century New England still filled with old-fashioned Transcendentalists, commuters who go to the city by train, and a society in which smoking is a rite of passage -- the relationships between parents and sons are eternal.
Much of the story evolves in a series of comparisons between the narrator's…...
mlaWorks Cited
Updike, John. "My Father's Tears."
John Updike & Nathaniel Hawthorne
John Updike and Nathaniel Hawthorne are two of the most well-known writers to have contributed to the body of American Literature. Updike, the more recent writer of the two, has been considered one of America's most prestigious writers, often honored by collegiate bodies and authoritative figures. Likewise, Nathaniel Hawthorne in his time was recognized and respected, having come from a background commanding some respect. Both authors however, during their life struggled with negative issues; Updike for example struggled with separation and health problems that plagued him since he was a child. Hawthorne struggled with his ancestry who embodied a rigid Puritanical belief system, and also struggled with the poverty of his family that he was never quite able to overcome during his lifetime.
The works of both Updike and Hawthorne tend to have some autobiographical notes. Each author draws from experiences within their own lives. Negativity, feelings…...
mlaWorks Cited:
Jalic, LLC. "Nathaniel Hawthorne." Jalic, LLC. (2004). {Online} Available:
De Bellis, Jack. "The John Updike Encyclopedia." Greenwood Press, Westport: 2000.
Farr, J. "Haunted Hawthorne." The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 28, winter 2004.
Lengel says, "That's all right...but this isn't the beach." And after a counter-protest by another of the three girls, Lengel lectures, "e want you decently dressed when you come in here." For all the readers know, Lengel himself is turned on by the lovely young women, and is only ranting at them in order to gaze at the splendor on display. In any event, Queenie says, "e are decent"; she is definitely becoming agitated, and as the narrator reminds readers, she is acutely conscious of her apparent high social standing, and needn't put up with a pious loser manager in a store "pretty crummy" store. The Sunday school pedagogue has his last say; "Girls I don't want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It's our policy." He turns his back on the girls. Sammy hasn't rung up the herring fillets yet; but the…...
mlaWorks Cited
Updike, John. "A&P." The Early Stories: 1953-1975. New York: Random House, 2003.
Wells, Walter. "John Updike's 'A&P': a return visit to Araby." Studies in Short Fiction 30.2
John Updike's "A&P"
"A&P," by John Updike is a short story that in its few pages, says more about love, desire and naivety than many works can in hundreds. The story centers on a seemingly-teenage boy, Sammy, who spends his summer working at a local A&P owned by a family friend. Sammy appears to be a hard-worker, going about his job with ease and precision despite the monotony of the situation, until one day when a group of girls walks into the store -- and everything changes. In viewing Sammy's character development in the short time over which the story takes place, in conjunction with the setting of the story and the theme of desire, readers are able to place themselves into Sammy's shoes and into a mindset in which summer love and desire seem to mean more than anything else the world has to offer.
The setting of the story does…...
mlaWorks Cited
Updike, John. "A&P," in Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary, 6th ed. pp. 1110-
1114. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. 2008. Print.
A&P
John Updike's A&P
John Updike's short story "A&P" mingles themes of sexuality, identity, and conformity. "A&P" is surprisingly complex, given its length. At the outset, the story seems like a peek at a young boy's frustrated sexuality. He describes the scantily-clad girls with curiosity, as an observer of social status and body language. A large portion of "A&P" is devoted solely to the lyrical descriptions of the three girls, their lack of clothing, the color of their skin, their heights, and their interactions with each other. Larry is attracted to them, but more than that, he wants to know their stories: why they entered the convenience store dressed in bathing suits when the nearest beach is five miles away. By noticing the items they select and the aisles they choose to walk down, Larry forms a personal impression of the girls. However, the narrator also addresses them as nonconformists, as people…...
a&P by John Updike
The Themes of omen Empowerment and Modern vs. Traditional American Society in John Updike's A&P
The short story A&P by John Updike chronicles the contemporary American society and how it treats issues of social stratification among members of the society. ritten in the 1960s, A&P provides an insightful look at the dynamics of gender and socio-economic differences of people in American society. hat is remarkable about this literary work is that it discusses issues on social stratification in the eyes and viewpoint of Sammy, a young man who works at the convenience store A&P. Sammy's character is an interesting and essential factor that gives the issue of social stratification because he serves as Updike's 'commentator' on sensitive issues such as gender discrimination on women and the snobbish and oppressive nature of the elite class in the society. Through Sammy's eyes, Updike's audience is given a holistic view…...
mlaWorks Cited
Updike, J. A&P. Available at http://www.tiger-town.com/whatnot/updike/ .
Individualization in America as Shown in Updike's "A&P"
John Updike's short story "A&P" has been the subject of much scholarly debate over the decades since it first appeared. On the surface a simple tale of youthful lust and rebelliousness, there have been many attempts to read deeper meaning into the story and to assign certain symbolic importance to the adolescent protagonist and other elements of the story. Through an examination of previous criticism on the work and a close reading of the story itself, it will be shown that the character Sammy in Updike's "A&P" symbolizes the emerging individualization of America's youth and it's clash with established norms in post-II society.
Sammy is a nineteen-year-old clerk at the A&P grocery store in a town "five miles from the beachand the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or something" to cover their beach attire in the more modest society of mid-century…...
mlaWorks Cited
Blodgett, Harriet. Updike's "A&P." Explicator Vol. 61, No. 4 (2003): p. 236.
Hao, Yun-hui & Gong, Yu-bo. A Thematic Reading of John Updike's "A&P" in Terms of Bildungsroman Story. Journal of Beijing University Vol. 71, No. 2 (2009): pp. 21-4.
Porter, Gilbert. John Updike's "A&P": The Establishment and an Emersonian Cashier. The English Journal Vo. 61, No. 8 (Nov. 1972): pp. 1155-8.
Stearns, Jennie; Sandlin, Jennifer & Burdick, Jake. Resistance on Aisle Three?: Exploring the Big Curriculum of Consumption and the (Im)Possibility of Resistance in John Updike's "A&P." Curriculum Inquiry Vol. 41, No. 3 (June 2011): pp. 394-415.
This interpretation is given further credence by the old butcher's "sizing up their joints."
This has been a contentious point in literature, politics, and the social sciences pretty much since the beginning of recorded history (and probably long before that). Sammy's boss Mr. Lengel does not appreciate the girls' dress, and repeats several times that the a&P is not a beach, eventually demanding that the girls cover up better before coming into the store the next time. Because of the frankness of the description of the girls and the obvious sexual desire expressed by Sammy and the other men, I was not too surprised that the girls' bathing suits earned negative commentary by the end of the story. The girls' reaction, though, did make me realize how much society has changed since the time the story was written. Now, not only do people (especially girls and women) wear much more…...
Farm: a Portrait of Relationships
In John Updike's short novel Of the Farm the protagonist, Joey Robinson, is a divorced, thirty-five-year-old Manhattan advertising executive. The story takes place during Joey's visit to his mother, Mary's unfarmed farm with his new wife Peggy and his step son Richard. This book examines the complexities of familial relations and the ramifications of divorce as well as the difficulties of dealing with an aging parent. Updike takes on the realities of the life of an uprooted man with a broken marriage and a new wife, whose dealing with the sadness of being separated from his children as well as his relationship with his stepson, and the complex, love / hate equation he shares with his old mother. Joey has pent up resentment against his mother for various reasons; for making his father move to the farm from a life in the suburbs, for refusing…...
mlaWorks Cited
Updike, John. Of the Farm. New York: Random House Inc. 1965.
Sammy, the narrator of John Updike's short story "A&P" is a young man who works as a supermarket cashier in a small town. Almost the entire story takes place in the market, describing a series of events leading up to Sammy quitting. Sammy is a first-person unreliable narrator, making the teenager an interesting character providing a unique perspective on the events that unfold. Through Sammy's eyes, the reader witnesses the violation of social norms. A group of young girls who are Sammy's age walk through the store in their bathing suits because is summertime and they have been at the beach. Sammy's reaction to the girls is first one of lust, as he stares at their bodies and especially develops a crush on one he calls Queenie. His friends and coworkers, also male, react the same way except for the store manager, Lengel. Lengel is of an older generation, which…...
mlaReferences
Porter, M.G. (1972). John Updike's A&P. The English Journal 61(8): 1155-1158.
Stearns, J., Sandlin, J.A. & Burdick, J. (2011). Resistance on aisle three? Curriculum Inquiry 41(3).
Updike, J. (1961). A&P. Retrieved online: http://www.tiger-town.com/whatnot/updike/
I. Introduction
II. Body
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