The setting is a small town north of Boston around 1960. Sammy is trying to clarify why he has impulsively quit his job as a cashier in the local A & P supermarket. He needs a sympathetic listener (or reader), someone who will grasp the meaning he is constructing for himself as he puts his actions into narrative order. Collapsing past and present in rapid yet reflective colloquial speech, Sammy tells how three teenage girls, barefoot, in bathing suits, came into t

The Birth of Venus, c.1485 by Sandro Botticelli (1444/5-1510) Galleria deo Uffizi, Florence, Italy/Bridgeman Art Library

"Darling," I said. "Hold me tight." (190)

Experiencing the dramatic irony of Sammy's narrative by enjoying Updike's allusions to Botticelli's art and to Pater's aestheticism enables the reader to see a romantic sensibility becoming modern by arriving at a certain form of consciousness. The modern artist knows that his human desires for completion, for perfection-which include desires for social justice and human love-cannot be fulfilled by any narrative, except as art, as illusion. Persons do exist, but not as illusions. Because the person is the only "other" that can enable love, the person, like love, will always escape whatever designs art and narrative have upon him or her. Updike shows in "A & P" that a gesture of a great refusal of official demands commits the modern artist to solitary expression of his own desire made, as Sammy comes to see his gesture has been made, for its own sake. It's a difficult stance. Botticelli, Pater noted sadly, eventually succumbed to the religious and political reforms of Savonarol!

ain the mood, even at the price of supplanting reality with a vision (Donoghue, Walter Pater 152-53). Updike's character, Sammy, possesses what Pater knew all artists and aesthetic critics possess: "the power to be deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects" (Pater xxi). The aesthetic critic, like the artist, regards such objects, whether paintings or trees or human beings, as "powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels and wishes to explain, by analyzing and reducing it to its elements" (xxi); his attention, however, is mainly on his own impressions and with no other purpose than to make them available in language, "for their own sake" (xxiv). The whole enterprise, from first perception to subjective impression to adequate expression, works to exalt the pleasure, to keep the pleasure going by requiring objects to "attend upon minds, and in the end to yield to them" (Donoghue 153). Pater wro!

-not of his community-but of his own private vision. Sammy's morality is like Botticelli's: ". . . all sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist" (Pater 44). When Pater writes his impressions of Botticelli's painting, The Birth of Venus, he stresses the coldness of the fight and the sorrow in the goddess's face: "what is unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the goddess of pleasure, as the depository of a great power over the lives of men" (47).

You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really think there is a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight. (188-89)

Because Updike wrote "A & P" for The New Yorker, the story assumes a reader whose response to Sammy can go far beyond what the character can articulate for himself 4 Walter Wells, calling attention to the elevated diction which concludes Sammy's highly "ambivalent" epiphany, suggests that "hereafter" points Sammy toward an indefinite future in which he may or may not find "viable alternatives" to a "defunct romanticism" (133). I hope to show in this essay that Updike offers the reader a way to see that Sammy's narrative, as a completed artistic gesture, is already in the mode of one of those alternatives. Sammy does look ahead as he senses the inadequacy of available cultural forms to express his sexuality and his moral sensitivity. Sammy does not, however, renounce the source of his will to act as he did. That source is triple: first, the ability to respond erotically to the beauty of a young woman's

Some common words found in the essay are:
John Updike's, Library Sammy, Botticelli's Venus, Sour Cream, Herring Snacks, Birth Venus, Matisse Updike, Walter Pater, Unlike Dante, Pater Updike's, botticelli's venus, birth venus, dramatic irony, short fiction, york knopf, studies short fiction, informed reader, updike's 'a, studies short, john updike's, 'a p', updike's character sammy, 'a p' studies, john updike's 'a, updike's 'a p',
Approximate Word count = 4944
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page double spaced)