A & P takes place in a community inland that is sandy, yet near the coast. It starts out in the supermarket in which three girls in bathing suits walk in. One of these girls catches the eye of Sammy, which is working at the supermarket, Queenie. “The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. 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, at the top of the backs of her legs.” Sammy sees these girls and wants to be like them, free in a sense. As time goes on the girls finally get what they wanted and decided to check-out.
They make there way to Sammy’s register where there comes Sammy’s manager, Lengel, to complain to the girls about their dress attire. Sammy’s feelings for Queenie changes when he hears her voice. Her voice is normal and he has built this romantic image of her in his mind. Hearing her voice and realizing she is a normal person, (that happens to be wealthy) slightly changes his feelings for her.
It brings him back to reality a little. “Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over ‘pick up’ and ‘snacks.’ All of a sudden I slid right down her voice into her living room.” Sammy feels as if he has no chance to get noticed by her unless he does something out of the ordinary. So after she is done arguing with Lengel, Sammy decides to stand up for her and quit his job in hopes that she will notice him. The girls, and who’d blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say ‘I quit’ to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they ” ll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow. As this is happening Sammy starts to see the stupidity of what he just did, but still quits since he already stated it he might as well do it.
The Essay on Sammy Girls Lengel Story
John Updike's "A&P" is set in a grocery store just north of Boston and not too far from the beach. It is a glimpse into a day starting like any other but then shaken up by three teenage girls in their bathing suits. The main character is a nineteen year old boy named Sammy. Sammy is like any other teenager. He has very specific views of the different social classes of the store's customers and ...
He says, “But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it.” When he leaves his job and steps outside the store he realizes the mistake he has made and how it will affect the rest of his life. He begins to see that his actions were pointless, the girls never noticed, the store has changed in anyway, and life goes on. He left the job to impress the girls, to try and change his position in life but this didn’t happen. I look around for my girls, but they ” re gone, of course. There wasn’t anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn’t get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through.
His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he’d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter. He notices that no matter what he would have done, these girls would never pay him any attention. He now feels extremely bad because of this and that he left his job.
