attempts to make a heroic gesture upon three girls "in nothing but bathing suits" (Updike 12) by

quitting his job. Sammy appears to be highly sensitive to class differences, and he struggles to be

heroic by defending privileged upper class girls who do not even acknowledge his existence

(McFarland 323). After the girls exit, Sammy is left feeling "how hard the world was going to be

to me hereafter" (Updike 17). Consequently, Sammy seems to be a juvenile delinquent struggling

to rise above the confinement of the lower class to the elite, upper class. Updike's use of

figurative language, irony, and tone in Sammy's characterization accentuates the hopeless

remorse that Sammy feels by the end of the story.

The first use of figurative language in the story appears in Updike's creation of Sammy's

adolescent diction. Sammy's slang demonstrates his lower class background in passages such as

"She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can" (Updike 12) and

"some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on" (14). Sammy's choice of words in

Sammy steps outside, he relates, "my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going

innocent humor when he leaves the A & P. Even now, he is still a part of the teenage world when

down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and

appears to be nonchalant about the entire thing. Even though Sammy struggles to maintain the

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