"A & P" by John Updike, is the story of a miserably employed young man. Using the first person point of view, Updike's central character, Sammy, develops the setting to tell the story of how a discontented young grocer named Sammy, is thrust into the harsh realities of the adult world after making a relatively childish decision. .
The story is set in a conservative New England town before the sexual revolution and pre-hippies 1960s. Life tends to be stable, predictable and consistent. Sammy has recently turned nineteen years old; an age at which the stone that things were once written in, begins to erode. The late teen years tend to be the age when most people begin to have a greater sense of who they truly are. As a result, they will tend to challenge authority as well as the values and social mores that they have been told all their lives are "right". However, this age also marks the period in life where the line between childish rebellion and asserting oneself as a responsible adult becomes blurry. .
The town that "A&P" is set in seems to be anything but accommodating to this period in life. The area is reminiscent of those towns such as Oxford and my hometown, Vicksburg, which have officially been declared "retirement towns". These places offer very little in the way of careers for those who are not already "established" or even socially for those under the age of sixty. A young man in his late teens can begin to feel very out of place in an area such this. Sammy apparently does and his resentment towards this fact is evidenced in his attitudes towards his customers and his employer, Lengel. He refers to a customer who corrects him when he charges her twice for a box of crackers as a "witch"(1) who "if she"d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem-(2) He considers the customers to be "sheep"(5) and his boss a gray old man. .
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The audience may even be brought to the conclusion that Updike may be injecting some of his own feelings about the onslaught of the supermarket culture at the time the story was written.
