Week 1, Question #1

Susan Hines
Ms. Amy Bolaski
English 103
June 27, 2009

Week 1, Question #1
Choose a selection and explain how the concept of romantic love is treated. Does it offer a traditional take or challenge typical conventions?

John Updike’s story “A & P” is told as a monologue through the mind of Sammy, a 19 year old grocery clerk who is a romantic dreamer. Who else besides a romantic dreamer would see everything so passionately and see every detail so vividly? Who besides a person who longs for romance would share with you the littlest details so that you could be completely engrossed in the same place his mind is? Who else would write in a way that evokes every sense the reader has? Sammy is young and full of hope that some day he will find the love he dreams and fantasizes about. Sammy’s romanticism is depicted in his descriptive soft view of everything he sees. He sets the stage so that we, the reader, can feel like we are in the store with him, seeing every detail as he describes it. Sammy tells us about the three girls who enter the store in nothing but bathing suits and he describes in great detail what each suit looks like in color and texture and how each of the three girls are physically and characteristically different. He lets the reader see what he sees. Sammy brings to life for the reader his feeling of anticipation of seeing the girls when they had momentarily ducked out of his sight when he says “…and wait for the girls to show up again. The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn’t know which tunnel they would come out of” (603). I believe that his is a wonderful analogy for what waiting for love really feels like. Sammy shares with us that after passing the girls in an aisle, a “few houseslaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past” (602). I think that what Sammy was feeling was how sad it is that life goes on in such a mundane sad way daily for many who have not found romantic love. These “houseslaves” are his example of the need to not just settle and get by but instead to search and find a romantic love like the one he fantasizes about. When Sammy describes the way the barefoot queen girl walked saying that “she came down a little hard on her heels” it gave the reader a sound that they could imagine hearing in the store. After the girls have found the item they wish to purchase they are in his line at the register when Sammy is jerked from his romantic fantasy by his boss who has just come into the store and is displeased with the fact that the girls are only wearing bathing suits so he confronts them when they are paying for the item. This makes the girls eager to “be in a hurry to get out” (604). At the end of the story the author writes that Sammy quits his job after the girls have left the store. We are told that when Sammy walks out of the store he looks for the girls but they are gone. All Sammy sees is a “young married screaming at her children” (605). Sammy, in the story, describes to us his coworker Stokesie as “a responsible married man finding his voice.” (602). Sammy wants to be the happily married man .This to me represents the hope Sammy has that true love is possible and to find it Sammy feels he must leave the store and go in search of it.