Who Is The Narrator In A & P

The main character and narrator of “A & P”, Sammy, is quite the people-watcher. He has developed acute observational skills, and uses them to observe people in excruciating detail and give us, the readers, a strong sense of what the environment of the A & P supermarket was like on the eventful day of the story. Sammy’s descriptions give us an idea of what he believes lies beneath the surface of the other characters. However, The descriptions do not merely tell us about the people encountered in the story. inadvertently tells us much about himself through his descriptions and opinions of others. Sammy describes the customers of his A & P store as “sheep pushing their carts down the aisle” (Updike 20). His depiction of the customers as mindless sheep emphasizes a significant aspect of his personality. He views the people around him as dull, mindless and boring. This sort of disdainful attitude is shown not only to the customers, but also to his fellow
One relatively brief example is his derision of Stokesie’s desire to work for the purpose of achieving something and become manager. Another example is in Sammy’s final decision to quit his job at the store. His goal was to try to play the role of a hero for the girls, but it came out as more of a mild temper tantrum than as a noble act. In his description of the three girls. Sammy “seems immature for his age and rather ‘girl crazy.’ His descriptions of the young women are...quite adolescent” (Moscowitz 37). Even from the beginning, Sammy describes them in extreme, lewd detail. “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...at the top of the back of her legs” (Updike 19). It was the lust that he shows us which caused him to commit the fateful deed of quitting his