John Updike's A & P Gives a Lesson in Class

It is a scenario that takes place in local supermarkets everyday across the country- herds flock to the grocery store and mechanically dump consumer items into their carts that marketers tell them they just "have to have." Like sheep, they always stay in their place and follow the crowd, never causing a scene or straying from the herd. In Updike's A & P, the narrator, Sammy, attempts to break out of the mold and quit his monotonous job of checking the "sheep" through because a few innocent girls were treated with disrespect by an authority figure due simply because of their social standing.

Throughout the story, the customers shopping in the A & P are portrayed as sheep. They are always going about their business without ever being aware of what is going on around them or the fact that they have conformed themselves to society. "I bet you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering…" (Updike 1546). But the three girls that come into the store are different from the sheep. They fail to conform to society's rules. "The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle-the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one way signs or anything)-were pretty hilarious" (Updike 1546).

The sheep are so used to this monotony that when anything out of the ordinary occurs, they are anxious to see what is going on. "All the while, the customers showing up with their carts, but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word" (Updike 1548). The fact that they are referred to as sheep so often throughout the text makes them seem passive to a capitalist society. These sheep shopping in the A & P will most likely not be part of the upper class. More likely they will be middle to lower class citizens who do not hold the power in society and are therefore expected to follow the rules set by the upper class. Eagleton calls these citizens in the middle class "narrow, harsh, unintelligent, and unattractive spirit and culture" (Eagleton 2245). He goes on to explain that their "natural educators and initiators are those immediately above them" (Eagleton 2245). The cause of this may be that society could be moving towards an anarchy (Eagleton 2245). The upper class, which has the control over the middle class, holds all the power in a capitalist society.

As a cashier, Sammy's job is to ring up the sheep's purchases, bag them, smile, and say 'have a nice day' as they exit the store. Due to the repetitiveness of his job, his mind often wonders. During the beginning of the short story, the monotony of Sammy's job causes him to make a mistake and ring up the same item twice (Updike 1544). Sammy is intelligent enough to understand he is to only ring up the item once, but the monotony and separation from his work causes his mistake. Later, Sammy explains that his job gets so dull at times that he hears songs and words to the sounds of the cash register (Updike 1548). Marxism describes this experience.

As a direct result of division of labor within the capitalist society, workers no longer have contact with the entire process of producing, distributing, and consuming material goods. Individuals are cut off from the full value of their work as well as from each other, each performing discrete functional roles assigned to them by the bourgeoise. (Bressler 164)
Sammy's work is so dull that he begins to take less pride in his work and the quality of the work they do will suffer.

Finally at the end of the story, Sammy decides to stand up to the oppressive forces of capital (and his boss) and quit his job. His protest to his boss states that we are all human beings and we should not be treated differently because of our social standing. Sammy believes no one person can be better than another although society and capital leads us to believe differently. By quitting, Sammy gives a voice to the girls (those oppressed by the system of capital).

Although it is common knowledge that no one human being is better than another, when money and status are involved, common knowledge is easily forgotten. When Sammy accidentally rings up an old woman's purchase twice, she hassles him for his mistake. "I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of the cash-register watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up" (Updike 1544). The woman's status is presumably higher than Sammy's because she is older and is likely to be in possession of more money than him. She feels she has the authority to be rude to Sammy because she has a higher status and therefore must be better in the eyes of a capitalist society.

Although Sammy stands up to his boss for the girls' sake, he even has the mindset that he is better than them. When the girls first walk in, Sammy thinks about the girls in a sexual manner and frequently "checks the girls out." His position of authority as a cashier over the girls' position as customers gives him a sense of power. After the girls are kicked out of the store by Sammy's boss, who harasses the girls for not being dressed appropriately, Sammy quits his job for the girls and for the pure fact that he believes this was an incredibly unfair act. He expects the girls to honor him as their hero, but the girls are no where to be found. As Sammy is leaving the store, he turns around and sees his boss checking the sheep through.

"His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he's just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter" (Updike 1549). Sammy now realizes that adults cannot help becoming caught up in this system of capital. Their lives revolve around making money, achieving status through material items, and continuing this cycle until they die. There will be no satisfaction because there will always be someone with more than you. The things that we possess have become what define us. A solution to this problem comes from a Marxist point of view and says,
…society shapes our consciousness, that social and economic conditions directly influence how and what we believe and value, and that Marxism details a plan for changing the world from a place of bigotry, hatred, and conflict due to class struggle to a classless society in which wealth, opportunity, and education are actually accessible for all people. (Bressler 162)

But until we receive this seemingly impossible classless society, it seems that youth are the only individuals left who have not yet attained a permanent status in society. The youth are free to quit their jobs and attain new ones because they don't have a real need for status yet. But as Eagleton states, "deny to working-class children any common share in the immaterial, and presently they will grow into the men who demand with menaces a communism of the immaterial" (Eagleton 2245). But as Sammy turns around and sees his boss, he realizes that someday, he too, will be doomed to be a slave of the material world as most adults are.

A & P is a representation of how we live our lives in the real world. Many of us do not notice the power material goods have over us because it is something we live with everyday. We mill around like sheep, never questioning authority or going against the norm. But when something or someone does come along that questions the way we live, we are intrigued. We allow our personal belongings to determine our worth in society and we live by the rule "the more we have the better we are." We show up everyday for work and like robots, mechanically go through the motions in order to get the paycheck and obtain more material goods and make ourselves seem more powerful to others.

WORKS CITED

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: an introduction to theory and practice.
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003.

Eagleton, Terry. The Course in General Linguistics. The Norton Anthology:
Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch, Vincent B., et al. New York:
W.W. Norton & Co., 2240-2249.

Updike, John. "A & P." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Ed. Cassill, R.V. and Richard Bausch. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000. 1544-1549.