A & P by John Updike

1. As I began reading this short story I thought the guy was a total weirdo. It was almost as if he was spying on people for a living as appose to being a cashier. The imagery in which he created through his use of words when describing the girls was pretty vivid, but again really weird. Never in my life have I described the opposite sex using food, but then again I never worked in a supermarket. Like I said previously the guy seems like a complete weirdo who needs a life, and in a way thank goodness he quit because maybe then he will improve on his social skills which obviously are lacking at this point.

2. Within the short story A & P, the narrator reveals several things about himself. First, he is a nineteen year old cashier within a A & P during the summer. With this in mind the narrator maybe be earning money before leaving to college. Anyways, to bide time within his job which he finds rather boring he analyzes people's characteristics. When the girls walked into the store or supermarket he was immediately taken with their characteristics and watched their every move. These characteristics made him draw several conclusions that led him to his initial interaction which proved his developed characteristics about these girls wrong. Furthermore, by the end of the story the narrator begins to realize that maybe not everyone is how the seem to appear so he quits his job and is left in a parking lot without the desired girls that he was hoping to see. He goes back to his feeling that people are how they seem, superficial, and the world could possibly be out to get him. It is with these feelings in which he indirectly expresses that the reader feels the narrator is portraying life in general to that of a supermarket, where people seem superficial as we do not interact with them and then discover that again not everyone is how the appear and we should not judge others based on how we view them.