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

The Turning Point in John Updikes A & P John Updikes short story A & P reveals nineteen-year hoary Sammy, the central character, as a complex person. Although Sammy appears, on the surface, as freewheeling and driven by male horm champions, he has a lengthy order of business to settle. Through depersonalization, Sammy reveals his ideas about sexuality, social class, stereotypes, responsibility, and authority. Updikes technique, his motif, is repeated again and again through with(predicate) the active teenage mind of the narrator Sammy.Sammy is, like most junior 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 incertain terms, what he is thinking. He gives each girl a name--Plaid, Big stately Goony Goony, and Queenie--based on his evaluation of their physical body parts. The game is one that teenager s play the world over, with countless hours spent seeing and being seen. The indigenous object to view, in Sammys eyes, 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 schedule watching, but she didnt tip. Not this queen (28). Sammy goes on to tell how she ... off-key so slow it made his stomach rub the inside of his apron (28). The chaff of the setting is that the girls, dressed in nothing but swimsuits, have turned the neighborhood grocery store into a human meat market, with themselves as the commodity of choice for the male consumer.In Sammys minds eye, the queen was of such magnificent bearing that she commanded his worship. He envisioned his well-bred idol as being of a higher social class than his own. ... ...iphany that afternoon in the A & P.Sammys immaturity and lack of experience were largely to blame for his wrestling with contrasted roles in his transition from child to adult. Updikes prot agonist was at the same m an imaginative, observant young man who stood by his convictions, defending the girls to the end. Sammy was perhaps much intelligent and more gutsy than one would like to give him realization for, however. He knew what he did not want out of life. On that atomic number 90 afternoon in the A & P, his name game caught up with him. Quitting his affair was to be a turning point for him, a time for him to dwell his own issues of sexuality, social class, stereotyping, responsibility, and, on a deeper leve, authority.Work CitedUpdike, John. A & P. writings Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. Ed. Robert DiYanni. 5th ed. New York McGraw, 1998. 27-31.