A&P Updike

After reading John Updike’s short story A&P, you'll be left curious if Sammy, narrator and central character, is struggling for something more, or just struggling against everything. In Sammy’s small town world, John Updike creates a large visual image of two distinct sets of people, one that is vague, offensive, and animalistic, and another that is identifiable yet equally disturbing.
A depressed township where people sleepwalk through their day and pedantically attempt to control their environment is where John Updike drops us off. In the A&P grocery, Sammy comes into contact with life’s nauseating minutia. Without walking from his checkout stall, Sammy gets snorted at by a nit picking customer hawking over his check stand and Sammy sees her as just being a nose wart away from full black magic witchdom. He is surrounded amid flocks of sheep-like costumers all marching to the same rhythm. Sammy twice observes that they all walk the same direction. If it’s down the cat a...