Updike a&P

Themes and Characters
The encounter of Sammy, a checkout clerk at an A & P supermarket, with a trio of swimsuited girls encompasses many of the themes central to adolescence, including accepting the repercussions of one’s choices. When Sammy quits in protest of how the girls were treated by the store’s manager, he perceives that from now on, the world will be a more difficult place. As Sammy tells the story his language indicates that, at age nineteen, he is both cynical and romantic. He notes, for instance, that there are “about twenty-seven old freeloaders” working on a sewer main up the street, and he wonders what the “bum” in “baggy gray pants” could possibly do with “four giant cans of pineapple juice.” Yet, when Queenie approaches him at the checkout, Sammy describes her “prim look” as “she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top.” “Really,” he says, “I thought that was so cute.” He vacillates back and forth between these extremes of opinion during the story. He considers some of the customers “houseslaves in pin curlers,” yet he is sensitive enough that when Lengel makes Queenie blush, he feels “scrunchy inside.” At the end of the story, he quits his job in an effort to be a hero to the girls and as a way of rebelling against a strict society. Experiencing an epiphany, he suddenly realizes “how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter” if he refuses to follow acceptable paths.
Sammy most pointedly embodies an important theme in “A & P”: that of choices and consequences. While all of the main characters in the story must make a choice and endure the consequences of that choice, Sammy makes the most obvious and most meaningful choice, and on some level he is aware of the consequences. When he chooses to quit his job, he knows that this decision will have ramifications in his life that will last for a long time. His family is affected, and it causes him to recount the situation as “sad.” Because he has stood up...