3.6.1 The hero and heroism in Updike’s ‘A&P’

(SPOILER WARNING)

John Updike’s short story, "A&P" is concretely about a young man’s frustrations at being caught in a conventional town, surrounded by soulless people, and about his impulsive choice to quit a boring, futureless job. But on another level, Updike uses style, characterization and plot to develop a broader theme about heroism, painting it as essentially unrealistic and futile.

One of the first things to jump off the page in Updike’s story might be the style of expression employed by the main character, Sammy. The story is told from his point of view and thus employs his distinctive manner of speaking. Sammy tends to use a crude, un-intellectual style of expression. He uses awkward expressions and peculiar grammar. The story begins, "In walks these three girls [. . .]" (981) and this style continues with phrases like, "there was this one [. . .]" (982), "she kind of led them [. . . ]" (982), "and, what got me, [. . .]" (982), "where, what with the glare [. . .]" (983), and "Lengel’s pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest [. . .]" (984). The style is not merely informal, it is calculated to give the impression of someone who is perhaps not too well-educated or intelligent; of a caricature of an average small-town American; of someone you would not expect to read about in the newspaper later having done something extraordinarily good—or extraordinarily bad.

But we might expect something mildly bad from Sammy. His rambling observations and commentary about those around him reveal a nasty disrespect for other people. When he makes a mistake at the cash register he becomes angry at the customer for being upset about it, describing her in uncomplimentary terms and making negative assumptions about her motives (982). He calls the customers ‘sheep’ and makes numerous references to their cattle-like behavior. He portrays a co-worker’s ambition to become store manger as unrealistic, (983) and complains bitterly of the current manager’s authority, calling him a "kingpin" (984).

Sammy’s bad attitude is best shown by his attitude toward the three girls who enter the store. Admiring their physiques, he refers to one girl’s "can" twice (982; 984) and to her "scoops of vanilla" (985). Unable to guess why the girls have entered the store in such unusual outfits—only swimming outfits—he makes the comment that "you never know for sure how girls’ minds work (do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?)" (982).

Through his vaguely superior attitudes toward his customers and his fellow employees, and his mildly sexist attitudes toward women, Updike paints Sammy as not intensely immoral and despicable, but rather as unnotable and uninspiring. We are not invited to hate Sammy, but at the same time, we are most definitely not invited to admire him. Add to this the lack of intellectual or cultural impressiveness of his style of self-expression, and we have the picture of an utterly un-heroic mediocrity—a perfect mediocrity, drawn by a master.

In itself, the use of such a character is not remarkable. Many modern writers are not interested in the portrayal of heroes or heroic deeds. But in "A&P," Sammy’s lack of many classic traits of fictional heroes is essential to the story. Updike does seek to portray heroism—in his own particular terms and in his own particular light.

The concept of a "typical hero" is of course somewhat vague. I use it to mean what a high-school student might think of: heroes from much romantic fiction from the nineteenth century by authors like Hugo or Rostand, or, more likely, their descendants in modern fiction of the popular type, like the heroes from Hollywood films.

Such heroes are not always, but are often, intelligent. They have a better than average chance of being articulate enough to give some voice to their principles. They tend to have sufficient strength of mind or body to give their competition a good run, making them people we admire and would like to be like. They are thus exactly what Sammy is not.

They also fight for something. And the typical hero fights for something that is either important, or that they have good reason to regard as important. When the store manager politely tells the attractive girls that it is store policy that they must have their shoulders covered, Sammy tells the reader, "that’s policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want" (984). A moment later, because of the insult Sammy believes the manager has given the girls, he quits his job. Updike has given Sammy something to fight for. It is even, on the surface, the chivalrous hero fighting for the honor of a fair maiden. But in fact, Updike has given to his character something trivial and irrelevant about which to fight, something obviously not worth fighting for. Not only is the "hero" un-admirable, his cause is uninspiring.

Sammy’s statement that he quits is the climax of the story, and if the story were being written by another author, that author might have placed the line, "I quit" in a paragraph by itself for emphasis, or perhaps lingered on the moment with details about how he looked or sounded, or appeared to others. But Updike does the opposite. He embeds the line in a rhythmically and grammatically subordinate place in the first sentence of the paragraph and then changes the subject immediately for the remainder of the paragraph. "The girls, and who’d blame them, are in a hurry to get out. So I say ‘I Quit’ to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they’ll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero" (985). Updike wants very much to avoid any of the melodrama associated with typical heroic fiction. Even beginning the sentence telling us the girls are in a hurry seems to make us in a hurry, tempted almost to skim past the bit about Sammy quitting.

However, he does not want us to miss the fact that Sammy’s gesture is, at least on the surface of it, a heroic gesture. Through Sammy’s narrative he has simply told us. By this time we see the irony, and so even, judging by his tone, does Sammy.

When the store manager states to Sammy his reasons for speaking as he did to the girls, Sammy—no Cyrano de Bergerac—can say nothing more in response than nonsense words his grandmother used to use to imply that something is wrong (985). His stand has no real moral basis, at least that he can articulate.

Typical fictional heroes gain some kind of reward from their efforts. Even if entirely thwarted in fact, they usually gain at least some sense of satisfaction for having tried their best or having done the honorable or saintly thing. But Sammy immediately regrets his fateful brush with heroism. " ‘Sammy [the store manager says], you don’t want to do this to your Mom and Dad.’ he tells me. It’s true, I don’t" (985). Sammy knows already that it was a mistake.

"But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture, it’s fatal not to go through with it," continues Sammy’s narrative (985). It is as if his heroism was only an accidental slip. Sammy goes outside and sees that the girls are gone already. His gesture was concretely futile. He will get no direct reward from the girls (985). Ultimately Sammy leaves the A&P feeling regretful, believing that his action had served no purpose and would make life harder for him in the future (986). He hasn’t even the hero’s psychological reward of knowing he has done the right thing.

Sammy is portrayed as un-heroic, his cause as un-inspiring and his action as misguided and futile. He is unable to articulate any moral basis for his action and in the end, appears not even to have one. Again, in itself this might not be significant, but Updike chooses to constantly remind us of the tradition of heroic fiction from which "A&P" springs. He counterpoints the anticlimax of Sammy’s decision to quit with direct reference to the ostensible heroism of the act. He uses the form and some of the symbols of heroic fiction while denying their substance.

"A&P" is thus not merely a story that happens not to have a classic hero-type character. I believe that it is, in the consistency of the main character’s attitudes and character traits, in his actions and in the values that propel those actions, an intentional reversal of everything one normally expects to find in heroic fiction. I believe that it is at least part of Updike’s purpose to show heroes per se as really no better than the rest of us, maybe a bit worse; to show heroism per se as misguided, futile and perhaps a bit silly in its melodramatic self-importance—as a cliche. By making Camelot a small town full of provincial-minded "sheep" Updike cheapens Camelot. By making the damsel in distress three plain-looking vacationers he demystifies the damsel. By making the fire-breathing dragon into a rule-citing store manager he trivializes the dragon. And by casting a lout as hero, Updike effectively thumbs his nose at heroism itself.

Works Cited

Updike, John.  "A&P."  Thinking and Writing About
Literature: A Text and Anthology.  Ed.  Michael Meyer.
New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001

English Lit paper, April 18, 2002