In Updike’s “A & P”, the story is set in an A & P supermarket in a town north of Boston in the 1960’s. Sammy works as the checkout clerk in the store and on a typical day he makes the decision to quit. What led to his decision to quit? One of the reasons is that he wanted to impress the three scantily dressed girls. But there is a deeper force behind his spur of the moment decision. Sammy realized how bored he was in the grocery store world. He realized he was no better than one of the “sheep” he makes fun of. And this was bad because he didn’t want to be another one of the sheep. By quitting, he is rebelling against the constraints of society, which were set for him on a smaller scale by his boss at the time. Sammy quits to prove something to himself: he is not a “sheep” like the others.
Sammy’s a typical teenager who is very imaginative in his thinking. His descriptions of the girls show
Henceforth, the girls in the bathing suits indirectly inspired Sammy to quit. He thought they were better than him and he wanted to change that. When the manager yelled at them for inappropriate dress in his store, Sammy saw his chance to kill two birds with one stone. The girls would have to take notice when he stood up for them, and he broke free of the conformity of his dull job. After Sammy declares, “I quit”, his boss pretends not to understand him, which forced Sammy to reconsider. He then says to himself, “But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it.” So, he quit. After he walked out he knew how hard the world was going to be after that.
this: “She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit.” Sammy really enjoys the entertainment the girls bring in
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