Does Sammy Undergo Essential Change?

Does Sammy undergo essential change?

John Updike's fictional account "A & P" is a story of a 19-year-old teenager, Sammy, who impulsively quits his job in a grocery due to three girls in bathing suits. We, as listeners of his plight situation, may want to consider if Sammy learns something fundamental about himself as he justifies his indignant--yet presumptuous--actions that caused him to quit. The story begins as Sammy, a cashier in A & P, encounters three attractive ladies walk in a leisurely gait in midst of the store. Sammy checks them out and describes their appearances in detail. The most appealing one, whom he names "Queenie," becomes the very source of eroticism in his dreary life.

Sammy is immediately seduced by the physical exposure of the girls from the beginning. His shallowness is well demonstrated as he values and fantasizes the girls over their bodily features.

There was this chunky one, with the two-piece--it was bright green and the seams of the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit)--there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose. . . and a tall one. . . the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much. . . (285).

Sammy then discovers the girl of his dream. By her looks and the way she leads others, he calls her the "queen" and puts her in his paramount interest: "She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima-donna legs. . ." (285).

Sammy interprets the "queen's" movements which give him such pleasurable sensation. His unbelievably realistic, even comical, delineation of the girl continues as he realizes her "straps were down," and how there was

nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light (285-286).

By now, Sammy's visual imagery about her is so ardent and aesthetic like that of an artist painting a goddess. His narrative includes some jocular dialogues with his fellow cashier as well: "'Oh, Daddy,'" Stokesie said beside me. 'I feel so faint.' 'Darling,' I said. 'Hold me tight'" (287). The conversation consists of colloquialisms that could belong to any two of vigorous youths in America.

There are accounts, however, that prove how his words and actions are representative of certain members of the culture. Immediately following the conversation, Sammy describes how Stokesie "thinks he's going to be a manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it's called the Great Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something" (287). The line reveals the typical American superiority and mockery about Russians prior to the year of 1990. Moreover, Sammy further educates us about the setting of the story as he mentions the "town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point. . ." and that when

you stand at front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real estate offices and about twenty-seven old freeloaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. . . (287).

His referring to the aberration about girls in bathing suit in the middle of town starts to make sense as he adds on: "It's not as if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and there's people in this town haven't seen the ocean for twenty years" (287). Furthermore, Queenie's purchasing the "jar of herring snacks" is another representative of the general scene of such place and Sammy's cultural background of the story; he works in an oceanic city where seafood snacks are prevalent.

The story then turns its phase onto the climax, what Sammy's family refers