Comment on the narration in the treatment of the teenager’s revolt in A & P and The Man Who was Almost a Man.
A & P is a great short story with simple words and unique point of view and skillful writing techniques, and in the story, we can find vivid depiction of the psychological changes of Sammy, the hero. From the character Sammy who is only a nineteen-year old boy, we see a rebelling teenager who, on the one hand, is still like a boy especially when he sees the girls is bathing suit, on the other hand, he is like a man sticking to what he believes. For a young boy like Sammy, the impulse to do something stupid might come easily, but the responsibility and the consequence are not so easy to take.
We can find some hint of Sammy’s revolt from almost the beginning when he is preoccupied by the girls’ entrance and not sure whether he has rung the HiHo crackers. When the customer, a lady, “starts giving hell”, he describes her as a “a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows”. He is like a child when he think about others especially those who blame him. And then he turns kind of humorous when he thinks that “I know it made her day to trip me up. She’d been watching cash registers for fifty years and probably never seen a mistake before.” The humor like this helps to calm and stop being rebelling, but he never considers that it is his fault, which illustrates his immaturity. However, when the something really matters for him, the rebelling spirit is hard to control. The mood starts with the confrontation of the manager with the girls. Obviously, Sammy likes the girls and it is not really wrong when they come in the store wearing bathing suit. It is just unacceptable for conservative people, but the manager’s attitude and the girl’s embarrassment stir up his revolt and finally he says “I quit.” to the manager. This gesture of protest shows his standpoint as a man. He sticks to what he believes which is heroic, but he never thinks this through because once the gesture is made the consequence must be taken. At the end of the story, Sammy seems regretful when he watches the inside of the store from the outside and he felt “how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.”
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 ...
In the story The Man Who was Almost a Man, Dave was a rebellious teenager as well. It is a story about this boy who wants to prove himself to be a man, but he tragically fails. Dave is seventeen. At the age of seventeen, he looks like a man physically and wants to be a man or to be treated like a man mentally. Yet, to his disappointment, people around him just regard him as a boy. There comes the teenager’s revolt that he wants to be a man even more when everybody treats him as a kid.
The teenager’s revolt is stimulated and enhance by the nonacceptance of the community, and to make it worse it is a community with both white and black people. As a black boy in a poor family, Dave’s revolt is enhance by the conflict between black and white as well as black and black as is said in the story “Could killa man wida gun like this. Kill anybody, black and white.” With this pressure, he is eager to have a gun with the naïve thought that a gun can make him a man. The way he gets money from his mom and the way hide the gun from her are pretty childish, which reflects that Dave is nothing like a man.
He lies about shooting the mule and cries when the lie is exposed. We can still see a boy full of fear, but after all the blames, he still thinks about the gun and finally gets it. Although he is afraid to shoot and cannot help but close his eyes when shooting, he shoots it anyway as if he is showing off and proving to others that he is a man. His rebellion is shown again “when he reached the top of the a ridge he stood straight and proud in the moonlight, looking at Jim Hawkins’s big white house.” The end of the story is somewhat positive and encouraging with Dave getting on a train with the gun. The readers may have some hope that after all he has experienced he may become man, which may be the positive result of the revolt.
The Essay on Almos A Man Gun Dave Running
Almos' A ManAt the end of the story, Almos' A Man, by Richard Wright, "Dave grabbed, pulled atop of a car and lay flat. Ahead the long rails were glinting in the moonlight, stretching away, away to somewhere, somewhere where he could be a man" (23). Although Dave considered himself a man because of his age, his gun, his job, and the train he still was a very immature boy running away from his ...
