Nothing Less than A Romantic Hero

A & P by John Updike is easily one of my favorite short stories I have ever read. As soon as I started reading it, I became entranced. There is something so real about Updike’s style of writing. But that doesn’t even begin to explain it, its more than that, something deeper. Its as though Updike sat down and wrote a story that perfectly blended two entirely different genres of writing that almost never mix: realism and romance, oil and water. Its easy to see how A & P can be considered realistic writing, the sentences are short, the meaning is clear, the honesty is stark. The narrator, Sammy, a grocery store cashier, is a typical teenager, his character left unblemished by profound symbolism and the harsh prodding of analytical scrutiny. From the very first few sentences the reader becomes aware of Sammy’s youth and pubescent immaturity, “In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. (1)” The grammar is simple and the tone is easy and flowing. As the plot moves forward, the piece exposes another realistic trait harnessed by Sammy, his consistent level of comedic input. Through humorous comments and descriptions, Updike is assigning his narrator a very clear personality type, one that demonstrates witty intelligence, and perhaps more importantly, one that separates him from the masses, or in Sammy’s words, the “sheep”. However, such traits are only intrinsic to his teenage character and do not yet identify him as anything but an amusing narrator. If the story began and ended as such, with no defining moment of revelation or character evolution, it would remain solely in the category of blatant realism. But Updike adds another ingredient to the mix: he makes Sammy a romantic hero. As his inner monologue progresses throughout the story, Sammy finally reaches a point of no return when he evolves into a character of extreme maturity. As he stands at his check-out slot, living his mundane life as the only wolf in a heard of sheep, he witnesses the scolding of the girl he has, in a way, fallen in love with by his manager. In an act of swift and decided heroic gesture, Sammy quits his job and walks through the doors, marking his departure from a haven of youthful safety to a world of harsh, livid reality. Within this scene alone, Sammy possesses all the traits of a true figure of romanticism; he shirks the idea of societal conformance, he expresses himself in true passionate emotion, and he rebels against the pre-set rules of conventionalism. As he steps out into the world he has just created for himself, Sammy is hit with reality, “my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” It is with this epiphany that Sammy emerges from the harsh fluorescent lighting and rubber-tiled floor into the realm of the true romantic hero, as he shirks his one-dimensional character, just as he shirked his grocer’s smock in the A & P. (543)