Sammy’s Wisdom: “A&P” by John Updike Research Paper

If wisdom is the faculty of discriminating between things on the basis of intrinsic value, Sammy, though a mere adolescent, is at least as wise as his grandmother, with all her years. He is, undoubtedly, wise enough to distinguish fiddle-faddle from sense even when it issues from the lips of his boss and, then, candid enough to declare his considered opinion in public. If this costs him his job, it only shows that he lacks the worldly wisdom or the street-smartness to cover his own back and let the rest of the world go where it may. As Sammy himself observes, his grandmother would have been pleased to hear his frank declaration of opinion in her own favorite put-down phrase. One would imagine that she (or anyone else with as much wisdom) would be equally proud of Sammy’s unusual, even precocious, powers of observation, discrimination, judgment, articulation, and execution—powers traditionally associated with wisdom—powers which will surely stand him in good stead even in as “hard” a world as Sammy might have to face “hereafter.”

Sammy’s powers of observation are such as easily strike a reader of “A & P.” Even as his first vision of the girls in bathing suits inside the store cause him to momentarily lose his concentration, and even while observing details such as “those two crescents of white … where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs,” he realizes that the customer he was serving at that time was “one of these cash-register-watchers” who had been “watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.” At the same time, he displays his powers of prompt execution by attempting to smooth her ruffled feathers (though she rewards him with merely a “snort in passing” for all his effort). If this seems like a show of ‘street smartness’ it does not detract from this paean to Sammy at all—for although it proves him smart enough to pamper a customer, it also reveals him as wise enough later to listen to his inner voice and refuse to pander to his employer’s whims in matters of principle.

Sammy’s powers of observation and discrimination are clear enough in his description of the leader of the bevy—the one he instantly realizes is the ‘queen’, or, as he later refers to her, “Queenie”:

She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn’t look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima-donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels as if she didn’t walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it.

Sammy’s description might make all this seem obvious enough to the reader, but one wonders, if, for example, Stokesie would have had sufficient discrimination to immediately sense that ‘Queenie’ was, in fact, the leader of the group—a conclusion that Sammy reaches in perhaps no more than a nanosecond. Comment on this, in passing—the narration proves that Sammy’s powers of description are highly developed and subtle. Shouldn’t Sammy be better placed to make use of this talent as a writer, say, than as a shop assistant?

Neo-feminists might come down hard on Sammy for suggesting that girls have perhaps no more than “just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar” for a mind, but perhaps he is deliberately being somewhat provocative, or, maybe, echoing the general male sense of mystification because no man can ever “know for sure how girls’ minds work”—however old or wise he be. Well, he praises her beauty so much that he perhaps feels he may have to look at her in the spirit of Shakespeare’s “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun” for there can be no doubt that he thinks his love … as rare.

As any, she belied with false comparison.

He is wise enough, even as wise as Shakespeare to realize that the wise reader may not wish to identify his “Queenie’ with a goddess, and therefore Sammy’s Queenie, “when she walks, treads on the ground” (1475) To stay with Shakespeare at least to the end of the paragraph, who can maintain that Sammy is not “a Daniel come to judgment” ( Merchant of Venice, 4. 1. 223-4) here?

Sammy articulates his thoughts with the imagery of a nineteen-year-old, all right, but he does so in such a way that readers of all ages readily get the point and the point of view. Take, for example, this description of Queenie, concentrated on the view from her hair to her shoulders:

She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unraveling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it’s the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn’t mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was.

Sammy’s wisdom comes out for certain both in his use of the word ‘prim’ to describe Queenie’s face and in his explanation for it—” Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it’s the only kind of face you can have.” It is evidence of the mastery of narration that no reader wonders at the extraordinary wisdom of this teenaged narrator.

Sammy is perhaps less than kind when he talks about Queenie’s friends as when he observes the “fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but on second thought she put the packages back.” But this is nothing compared with the scorn he reserves for the run of the mill A & P customer—his observation is sharp and the articulation of his observations even sharper:

The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle — the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything) — were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie’s white shoulders dawned on them, kind of a jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets, and on they pushed. I bet you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering “Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!” or whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct.

The bite in the words “sheep” and “house-slaves” might just have been missed on the first reading because of the accuracy and the hilarity of the observations. There can be no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that this nineteen-year-old is a keen observer of life and a sharp commentator.

It is in this context that one has to look at Sammy’s most memorable speech. Not the words “I quit”—these words are at first mumbled and garbled or spoken somewhat in the heat of excitement, perhaps—but his masterly denunciation of his employer’s self-righteous nonsensical pomposity:

I started to say something that came out “Fiddle-de-doo.” It’s a saying of my grand- mother’s, and I know she would have been pleased.

The expression as used by him might appear evidence of the teenager’s inarticulacy to an uninformed observer, but it is, in fact, the distillation of Sammy’s own wisdom and the wisdom passed on to him by all his ancestors personified by his grandmother, who, no doubt, has always been proud of this particular grandson of hers. Lengel probably considered it inarticulacy: “I don’t think you know what you’re saying” but Sammy clearly sees into the essence of the situation when he says, “I know you don’t,”… “But I do.” He sees what the situation demands and is prompt, even rapid in execution: “it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it”—and with no delay and no sadness, but with some trepidation he leaves the store for good. And for the better, no doubt.

Updike has claimed that he is “concerned with the private destiny that shaped people” (Goodheart 620). Sammy’s private destiny has certainly shaped him into something that cannot be confined within the limits of any A & P shop floor—he is meant to inhabit rarer regions, regions where his remarkable powers of observation, discrimination, judgment, articulation, and execution (all these combining to form the rarest wisdom) can be put to the best use. Sammy is destined to be a writer—a writer who may delight as many hearts as his creator Updike. As Updike has asserted (in a different context): “We are rewarded unexpectedly. The muddled and inconsequent surface of things now and then parts to yield us a gift” (Detweiler 15). Sammy the “unsuspected hero” has surely earned his gift.

Works Cited

Detweiler, Robert. John Updike. Twaynes United States Authors Series. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972.

Goodheart, Eugene. “Four Decades of Contemporary American Fiction.” The New Pelican Guide to English Literature: Vol. 9: American Literature. Ed. Boris Ford. London: Penguin, 1991.

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 130”. The Complete Works. Ed. Alfred Harbage. New York: Viking Penguin, 1975.

“The Merchant of Venice.” Complete Works. 236.

Updike, John. “A & P.” Web.