Thai art of John Updike's "A&P"
John Updike's best known, most anthologized and most frequently taught short story, "A & P," first appeared in The New Yorker (22 July 1961: 22-24), a publication that assumes a reader with considerable literary and cultural knowledge. Updike, for whom literature and art have been intertwined since youth,1 uses allusions to art and to art criticism to give the informed reader of "A & P" the experience of dramatic irony as a means toward constructing significance for the story. The popularity of "A & P" rests on a number of ironic ambiguities,2 but the reader who perceives Updike's allusions to art can take special pleasure in the plot, which leaves the nineteen-year-old narrator and protagonist, Sammy, feeling at the end both triumphant and sad, both winner and loser. 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
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 4944
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page double spaced)
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