Updike's Interview on "A & P" and poems

An ordinary, uneventful grocery store setting is shaken when three half-dressed young girls enter into the store. The setting of the story itself defines the view of the half-dressed girls. However, if they had been on the beach or at a pool the girls would not have been defined in that manner. It is this idea of, “public nakedness in a commercial setting,” that John Updike refers to in his interview that establishes the plot and conflict in “A & P.” The story is told through a male perspective at a time when people were more narrow-minded and opportunities were less prevalent. An earlier generation of perspectives and opposite gender views contribute to the different perceptions between John Updike and myself in the short story “A & P.”

In Updike’s interview he states the time period of the story is inferred as a small town setting. When I reflect on reading the story for the first time, I did not automatically assume that the story takes place in this type of setting. After Sammy quits his job he says, “… I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter,” and Updike in the interview relates this to the small town setting because he says everyone will be aware of what he did and label him a quitter.

In, “A & P,” Sammy compares the people in the store to sheep. In the interview, Updike relates this time period to an, “era of conformity.” This era consists of a time when people were narrow-minded and conservative, maintains Updike. When Sammy’s manager, Lengel, confronts the girls about the way they are dressed Sammy disagrees with his manager in the “unsheep-like” way. In the interview, Updike specifically relates Sammy and his act to the break through of Elvis and his unrestrained and nonconforming behavior. When watching the interview this relation to Elvis helped me understand the current type of society that Sammy was living in.

Updike portrays his own personal experience of adolescent feelings through the protagonist character, Sammy. When I was reading the story I did not assume that Sammy’s detailed portrayal of the young girls was contributed to lustful feelings. However, in Updike’s interview he specifically refers to a personal experience of seeing a girl in a grocery store with simply a bathing suit on, and he admits to his adolescent feelings of lust that it stimulated. The setting of a story in an older generation and the opposite feelings of genders caused the different perceptions between Updike and myself.

In the poem, “Rites of Passage,” Sharon Olds describes her sons birthday party in a symbolic manner. She relates them to grown men who are in a conflict of strength based on their different ages. At the end of the poem, her son admirably resolves the conflict by establishing a common kinship of strength among all of the boys. This is related to Updike’s story because the boy displays a sense of heroism by standing up against the common and accepted way of doing things and resolving the conflict.

In the poem, “The One Girl at the Boys’ Party,” Sharon Olds describes taking her daughter to a pool party and her being the only girl there. She describes her as superlative in comparison to the other girls. I do not relate this to any type of heroism. Olds describes her daughter’s character, but she does not commit any type of heroic act that benefit’s the other people in the poem.