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John Updike’s “A & P”: A Teenage View of the World

Sammy, a teenage cashier at a grocery store, has a typical teenage boys’ point of view of the world. Sammy likes to watch all kinds of people and has comments about how they look, what they do and where they go. Sammy has an odd sense of humor as he describes three attractive girls, an older lady, and the flow of the shoppers in his store.
The first view Sammy gives the reader is a description of three girls that walk into the store where he works. Sammy first talks about one girl who has on a plaid-green two-piece bathing suit. Sammy says “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”(par.1). Sammy uses some unusual wording when he talks about the girls’ buttocks. He calls her buttocks a ‘can’ and how the whites’ under the back of her buttocks looks like ‘two crescent rolls’. I have never heard the saying ‘can’...

Posted by: Darren McCutchen

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