The Turning Point in John Updikes A & P Essay -- A&P Essays

The Turning Point in tooshie Updikes A & P John Updikes short story A & P reveals nineteen-year old Sammy, the central character, as a complex person. Although Sammy appears, on the surface, as carefree and driven by male hormones, he has a lengthy agenda to settle. Through depersonalization, Sammy reveals his ideas closely sexuality, friendly class, stereotypes, responsibility, and authority. Updikes technique, his motif, is repeated again and again through the active teen head of the narrator Sammy.Sammy is, like most untested men, object-minded. The object of his mind is the female body. Although his upbringing and the fact that he is at work do not allow him to voice his admiration for the girls in bikinis at the A & P, he lets the reader know, in no uncertain terms, what he is thinking. He gives each girl a name--Plaid, Big Tall Goony Goony, and Queenie--based on his evaluation of their physical body parts. The game is one that teenagers play the conception over, with cou ntless hours spent seeing and being seen. The primary object to view, in Sammys snappers, is the queen. He describes how she must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but she didnt tip. not this queen (28). Sammy goes on to tell how she ... turned so slow it make his stomach rub the inside of his apron (28). The irony of the setting is that the girls, milled in nothing but swimsuits, have turned the neighborhood marketplace store into a human meat market, with themselves as the commodity of pick for the male consumer.In Sammys minds eye, the queen was of such regal bearing that she commanded his worship. He envisioned his well-bred idol as being of a higher(prenominal) social class than his own. ... ...iphany that afternoon in the A & P.Sammys immaturity and escape of experience were largely to blame for his wrestling with conflicting roles in his transition from child to adult. Updikes protagonist was at the same ti me an imaginative, observant young man who stood by his convictions, defending the girls to the end. Sammy was perhaps to a greater extent intelligent and more gutsy than one would like to give him credit for, however. He knew what he did not want out of life. On that Thursday afternoon in the A & P, his name game caught up with him. Quitting his job was to be a turning point for him, a time for him to confront his own issues of sexuality, social class, stereotyping, responsibility, and, on a deeper leve, authority.Work CitedUpdike, John. A & P. Literature Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. Ed. Robert DiYanni. 5th ed. natural York McGraw, 1998. 27-31.