Topic > The Power of Language: a Critical Analysis of John Updike's 'Ap'

“A&P,” written by John Updike, is a short story in which the narrator, Sammy, recounts the events that occurred at his workplace after three girls wearing your swimsuit you enter the shop. Sammy is a typical 19-year-old teenager who works at an A&P grocery store as a cashier in a conventional town where he has grown accustomed to observing customers and assuming things about their lives. In the story, Sammy uses colloquial and descriptive language to demonstrate his relationships and attitudes towards other characters, making us sympathize with him and see him as observant, critical, selfish, impulsive and vulnerable. In the first half of the story, before interacting with the three girls, Sammy presents himself as a normal boy as he uses casual language to describe customers in detail and express his feelings towards his life and work. Using first-person point of view, Sammy begins the story by recounting the moment he meets the girls, observing them closely and noticing small details about their physical appearance and actions. For example, she explains that the girls walked, "letting their weight shift along their toes as if they were probing the floor with each step, deliberately inserting a little extra action"; calls them "Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony"; and describes them respectively as "the queen", "the big boy" and the tall one with "the face as plump as a berry". Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Sammy seems to be very critical because he juxtaposes the three girls with old clients; for example, he praises Queenie's beauty but criticizes a customer who is "a witch in her fifties with lipstick on her cheekbones and no eyebrows." By providing these descriptions of cute girls and unattractive customers, Sammy influences the reader to see him as a caring and hypercritical character who, like any other young man, has a positive attitude and perception towards cute customers. Additionally, Sammy uses metaphors in the story to refer to the customers as "sheep", "house slaves", and "pigs in the chute", implying that they are followers in a uniform city, and he is different and superior to them because they do not share the same Perspectives on life: All the clients have a conservative demeanor and find the girls' actions unacceptable — this is seen when they look around "after pushing their carts to make sure what they saw was correct" — while Sammy has a liberal demeanor , which he cannot express openly due to his self-centered opinions that no character understands, and sees the girls' actions as a form of expression. This shows that Sammy is a critical and selfish character since he considers his conventional city a place where everyone conforms to established rules, acting and thinking the same way; the reader can understand Sammy's feelings because he is a reticent character and somewhat dissatisfied with his life. Additionally, Sammy explains that his coworker Stokesie is “married, with two kids” and “will become manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990.” He includes this detail about his coworker because he, unlike Stokesie, doesn't see himself working in the shop in the future, suggesting that he is a selfish character who deserves more and feels trapped in a job he doesn't like other words, in this part of the story, Sammy uses simple language to show his relationships with others characters to create a realistic tone that makes the reader sympathize with him as he is young, caring, critical and selfish. Likewise, in the second half of the story, when Lengel is.