A&P: Summary & Analysis

Beginning

Three girls in bathing suits — Sammy names the leader 'Queenie' — walk into the A&P on a Thursday afternoon. Sammy watches them with close, appreciative attention as they move through the store. They are out of place; the store's other customers stare. Sammy tracks them through his register's slow afternoon.

Rising action

The girls come through Sammy's checkout with a jar of Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks. Lengel, the manager — a Sunday school teacher, solid and correct — confronts them in front of the queue: the store requires customers to be decently dressed. Queenie blushes and protests mildly. Lengel holds firm. The girls pay and leave.

Ending

Sammy tells Lengel he quits, hoping the girls will hear. They do not; they are already in the parking lot. He takes off his apron and bow tie and walks out. He looks back through the glass: Lengel is at the register in his place, not looking up. The lot is empty. The last lines: 'my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.'

Sammy

Sammy's voice is the story's achievement. He is perceptive, funny, and self-dramatising in the way of a nineteen-year-old who wants to be someone doing something. His decision to quit is impulsive and theatrical — a gesture made for an audience that does not stay to watch it. The ending, in which he acknowledges this with clear-eyed honesty, is the story's coming-of-age moment: he did something that cost him something, for reasons that were partly noble and partly adolescent, and the world does not reward the gesture.

Lengel

Lengel is not a villain. He is enforcing a reasonable dress code in a grocery store. His confrontation with the girls is embarrassing but not cruel. Sammy frames him as the representative of everything conventional and correct — the A&P world versus the beach world — but the story does not entirely endorse this framing.

The gesture and its futility

Sammy quits to defend the girls and they are not there to see it. This is the story's central irony: the gesture is real (he actually quits, at real cost), but its intended audience is gone. The moment that was supposed to be heroic becomes private and unwitnessed. Updike's ending — Lengel at the register, not looking up — is the world's indifference to Sammy's sacrifice, which is the first adult thing Sammy understands.

The A&P as America

Updike uses the grocery store as a miniature America: orderly, commercial, rule-governed, hostile to the unconventional. The girls in bathing suits are the intrusion of sensuality and freedom into this regulated space. Sammy's quitting is his refusal of the A&P's terms — but the parking lot is empty and the world outside the store operates by similar rules.