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8) Many critics regard the ending as ambiguous. Do you share Sammy’s pessimism about his future, or are you optimistic? Do you think quitting his job was a pointless gesture or a noble action?
I am optimistic about Sammy’s future because life does not end once you have quit or lose a job. Once you have drive and motivation to continue the possibilities are endless. I think him quitting his job was pointless because he could have pulled his boss on the side later to resolve the issue. The girls did not even care about his noble gesture because they just left. It was like he was willing to lose so much for people who were not willing to lose a thing for him.

4. (a)What attitudes cause Mr. Lengel to be angry with the girls? Is his anger justified?
Does anything lead you to expect Sammy to make some gesture of sympathy for the three the girls? (b)What incident earlier in the story (before Sammy quits) seems a foreshadowing?

The girls pretentious attitudes caused Mr. Lengel to be angered. His is justifiable because from his perspective he is older than them and they should obey and listen to him, and not answer back. The fact that Sammy takes so much interest in the treatment of the three does tell that he is sympathetic to the situation, but no clues in the story show that he will make a gesture of sympathy. In A&P, on page 21, he says, “Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it’s sad, but I don’t think it’s so sad myself.” This line tells us that his stories ending is not positive one in the eyes of his family, which hints that the situation may have affected him that is why his family has so much insight. By him taking so much interest in the situation and view the situation so much, it is obvious he is thinking about what is happening very strongly.

QUESTION 5

a) Why does Sammy quit his job so suddenly? Is his gesture genuinely heroic or is it merely the misguided idealism of a rebellious adolescent? How is it prepared for earlier in the story? Why is it ironic?
Sammy was hoping that the girls say I quit and be an unsuspecting hero to them. Sammy was just trying to look like a responsible guy to the girls as he was trying to stand up for them. The girls not even interested in hearing Sammy hurried out of the store. Sammy in the beginning describes how no one in the town usually walks in with one piece bathing suits with the shoulders coming off of them. Normally older ladies would generally cover up with shorts and a shirt. This creates a problem because the manager does not allow this in his stores. He was not in this store how ever at this time so it was not an issue if we had known this we would have been able to see the foreshadowing that Updike was trying to give us.

(b) What do you think Sammy means when he says, “Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it’s sad but I don’t think so myself”?

Sammy feels that what he has done is a heroic thing standing up for those girls to his boss. The boss is a friend of the family how ever so to them him quitting means the parents are letting down one of their friends. Sammy states he has just turned 19 this could mean he is heading off to college and needs to help pay for it so after quitting the job he wont be making more money to help pay.

John Updike’s A&P
My question to answer in class was would the story be any different if it were not in a supermarket and I think the story would much different if not in a supermarket because of the simple fact of how Sammy would be judgmental of the women he “critiqued” as they walked in and out and through the checkout. If it were a clothing store or something else retail it might have been the same. But anything different where he didn’t have to stand around all day looking at nothing too interesting or do anything really exciting would have probably made the story a whole lot different due to the fact that he might have actually doing something. He wouldn’t have time to make these well thought out descriptions like “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.” That sounds to me like a description of someone who has way too much time on his hands, even on the job. This certainly wouldn’t happen if Sammy was working, say in construction. He definitely would have been looking at girls as they walked by during his lunch break going by the popular stereotype. But during working time he would be 100 percent focused on the task at hand because if not, he could get injured or maybe worse.

2) Sammy is a bored young man at a typical teenager type job, just trying to make some kind of entertainment for himself by watching and judging the girls that walk into the supermarket. He thinks to himself throughout most of the story and he says things like” and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very ‘striking’.” These kinds of thoughts are given by a teenager whose body is running rampant with hormones and needs something to occupy his time a little better at work. He a general teenager by the fact of his impulse decision to just up and quit for his own reasons which seem to make sense at the time and it made him look cool, but I am sure he would later realize out of the story that he made a bad mistake in quitting his job.
The supermarket setting is very vital in the plot of the story because in a car wash he couldn’t make these full body descriptions of these females and if it was in a fast food restaurant, he could make his descriptions, but not as much in depth because you are not waiting as long as in a supermarket and he has more time to look at them since they have to walk around the store to find what they are looking for. This story could not even exist in a business setting because for one, no girls would be walking in in bikinis on a regular basis and secondly, his descriptions would not be as fluid and plentiful as how they are now, and lastly, I am sure he would way too pre-occupied with some kind of work because it is usually very busy working in a business setting.

9. CONFLICT WITH ESTABLISHMENT: Where is YOUR local grocery store? If three girls in bathing suits walked into your local supermarket, what do you think the reaction would be today? Has society’s attitude towards such issues as “dress” changed or remained essentially the same in the past forty years? How would you (or, other people) react if three girls walked into a class at SLU in their bathing suit? In the library? In the church building? Does society still put limits on people for matters as trivial as “dress”? What, for example?
My local grocery store is an A&P and it’s located on route 31 North. If I saw a girl wearing a bathing suit I would look at her but I guess it’s not as big a deal. I wouldn’t think it was horrible. Society’s opinion about dress has changed in a big way. Many people dress sultry and they don’t care. Our world is becoming desensitized and many people don’t care. It really depends on the place, because Church is not a good place to wear a bathing suit to. Certain places have certain unspoken dress codes that they must follow.

Question2Sammy acts the way he does is because he is a nineteen year old kid. He is going to look at girls and make comments about them, he is not a weird person he is just over sexed and that’s all he is thinking about in his mind. I know that nineteen yearolds are very concerned about that sort of thing, I also feel it was right of him to stand up to his manager the way that he did.

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