The Parallels of "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" and "A&P".
Although written by two different authors with obvious distinctions in style, Richard Wright's "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" and John Updike's "A & P" are uncommonly similar in both meaning and their comparable title characters. Both "Man" and "A&P" are told through the eyes of young men: Dave Saunders and Sammy, respectively. It is here that their problems lie; they are no longer boys but, although they may yearn to be, they are also not yet men. Even with the drastic differences in settings, Sammy and Dave lead parallel lives. The title characters in both stories face many of the same challenges including job frustration, ridiculous obsessions, a longing for respect, and an overall lack of maturity.
Dave is a young black man of seventeen whose family is indebted to the plantation on which they live. As such, he is forced to work as a plow-boy for a measly two dollars a month to help support his family. This awful situation of poverty and almost no hope for a future makes Dave little more than a mule for the plantation's owner, a wealthy white gentleman. Because of his situation and young age, Dave has no validity in his opinions and is controlled entirely by the adults that surround him; he doesn't even receive the pay for which he works. Having no way out, he becomes frustrated with his daily life. His only way to escape this situation is to become a man before his time: to show everyone that "nobody could run over him" (Wright 278). However, typical of the child he is, Dave ignorantly believes that a gun will end his frustrations.
Sammy, from "A&P", also finds his own way to deal with his job frustration. At the young age of nineteen, he works as a clerk at a Boston A&P grocer. Like Dave, it seems that Sammy also faces a certain financial responsibility. Evidence suggests that he and his family may even be nearly as poverty-stricken as the Saunders family.
