In the article “The Art of John Updike’s A&P,” Toni Saldivar analyzes the way that Updike allows his character to grow in his short story through an imperfect understanding of modern art theory. According to Saldivar, Updike was educated with an artistic background and would have been very familiar with the modern ideas of perception. The author explains this well by telling the reader that first, Sammy appreciates the girls as objects, then he appreciates them for the individual inside the object, and finally, he appreciates both the object and the individual at the same time. This ability to appreciate the inner and the outer nature is, according to Saldivar, the essence of the modern experience.
Having established this idea, Saldivar moves on to illustrate those passages in the story that reveal Sammy’s growing understanding of this modern concept which represents, to me, a growing sense of his own ideas. Saldivar admits that the character Sammy doesn’t understand the complicated concepts that are being presented, through him, by Updike. He only understands the experience as it exists right now, but he hasn’t had the education to put it in the correct words or artistic contexts.
While Saldivar compares Sammy’s impressions to Botticelli’s famous painting “The Birth of Venus,” the author is also illustrating the way in which the emerging thoughts in Sammy’s brain are causing him to grow from a child accepting the impressions of others (or the mundane viewer of art who can see only the surface details) to an adult embracing his own deeper understandings. “His narrative also makes clear this: he is effecting (sic) his own rescue from an order of thought that demeans his feelings” (4).
Sammy’s decision to quit his job is therefore based both on his rejection of the conservative and restricting viewpoint of his manager as well as the free and nonconformist lechery of the butcher as he hopes the world, in the form of his family, will accept that his vision of himself has changed.
In Updike’s “A&P,” Sammy is the narrator. He works at the cash register in a small grocery store approximately five miles from the ‘point’ and in the center of town. He begins his story when he notices three girls in the store, all of whom are wearing nothing but bikini bathing suits. His descriptions of the girls are somewhat crass, using colloquial language to describe body parts and focusing on those areas where a tan line is obvious. He refers to their bottoms as ‘cans,’ their breasts as ‘melons’ and questions the existence of a brain within their skulls. His focus is entirely based on the physical and the base appreciation of the girls as objects.
He could as easily be describing a marble statue as a living, breathing human being when he discusses the image of Queenie walking up to his register. “They [the straps of Queenie’s bathing suit] were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess; as a result, the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim … With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones” (Updike 189).
This direction of his thoughts emphasizes his immaturity as his eyes continue to hunt for the girls while they move around the store. “The whole store was like a pinball machine, and I didn’t know which tunnel they’d come out of.” However, his thoughts begin to examine the beauty of the person inside the package as he begins to comprehend the reactions of the other people in the store. He notices the butcher looking after the girls and begins to change his thinking. He doesn’t want to be associated with such a gross appreciation of the girls and begins to notice how Queenie responds to her scrutiny by defiantly raising her head and continuing her search.
Saldivar illustrates very well how this change in vision on the part of Sammy is similar to an analysis of Botticelli’s painting “The Birth of Venus” and demonstrates how this is a progression in thought from the base observation of the exterior to the finer appreciation of the individual. Botticelli’s painting was a tasteful presentation of a nude, which was strongly questioned and largely criticized, but that defiantly radiated beauty regardless. This connection is made stronger as Queenie finds it necessary to assert that she and her friends ‘are decent’ to Sammy’s manager, who has suggested that they are wrong or base in some way.
It is at this point that Sammy comes to an understanding of the sublime, according to Saldivar, because of the manager’s response. He doesn’t want to associate himself with the crass butcher who is only capable of appreciating the surface, and he is aware that he has glimpsed a vision of beauty that remains well outside of even his manager’s understanding. Although he is not aware of how to express these thoughts completely, Sammy has grown within his own mind and cannot bring himself to shrink back into the very limited understandings of his old world.
While Sammy realizes few people will understand how he feels, and this is illustrated in his manager’s inability to understand Sammy’s decision to quit, Sammy is also aware that he cannot return to seeing things the same way as his manager, his friend, or his customers.
Because Sammy has a difficult time expressing what he has just experienced, the reader comes out of the story with a vague sense that tremendous growth has occurred, but the source of this growth is difficult to pinpoint. With the insight of Saldivar regarding Updike’s connection to art with this story, it is possible to pinpoint Sammy’s growth more closely and thus gain a much greater appreciation of the story. The benefit of this is that the reader, having the opportunity to experience both the story and the article that contributes to this understanding, then gains the opportunity to experience the same sort of growth Sammy experiences in the story.
Works Cited
Saldivar, Toni. “The Art of John Updike’s ‘A&P.’” Studies in Short Fiction. 1997. Web.
Updike, John. “A&P.” Tiger Town. 2003. Web.