A&P: Conflict between Sammy and His Boss - Essay Example

Sammy is left alone to face the hardship of unemployment. The author used the setting of the grocery store and first-person narration to describe the changes in the thinking and pattern of Sammy’s acts and justification of his behavior and choices he made and consequences he faced as a result.

In the story, Sammy leaps an adolescent, knowing life a little more than it was in the grocery store, into a man that can head towards the rough patch of life. The grocery store setting helps to shape his imagination by the opportunities that it gives Sammy to expand his imagination. In the grocery store, there are a lot of items. This is an advantage for the author to use his imagination to compare the girls with the items available. Moreover, the store exhibits a place where several people visit, and Sammy exhibits prowess in understanding all of them, for Sammy the customers are all too easy to understand. The same goes for his boss and Stoksie, a 22- year old colleague and a friend. In the beginning, he behaves as a sexist and describes one of his female complaining customers as a person without a brain in his statement “You never know for sure how girls’ minds work (do you think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?” (Updike).

The entrance of girls suggests to him the true mystery of other minds. Sammy wonders what they are thinking and describes them in detail using his imagination as a consequence of available free time at the store. For example, he describes one of the girl's faces as cherry and For instance, “She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unraveling, and a kind of prim face” (Updike, par. 4). The author uses first-person narration as a tool to convey his ideas more helpfully because it is more personal and helps convey the ideas and justifies Sammy’s behavior.

 The story also tells us about the typical way men think about women. Sammy’s changing point of view about women during the story from lust to sympathy and admiration makes it more interesting. Sammy’s point of view shows the desires he had for the girls.

You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor (Updike, par. 6).

Many factors influence the turnings in the story, for example with author's first-person narration style readers not only read the story but also feel it. The imaginations exceed the reality and the consequences cannot be apprehended, same was the case with Sammy, He made the most obvious and painful choice and he knew about the ramification of the choice in his life but he still thought defending the girls would be a heroic act and he would be at least admired for it but at the end, he just lost his job which allowed him to expand his thoughts and be an adult from an adolescent.