Wednesday, February 18, 2009

"A&P" by John Updike

I was reading a short story titles “A&P” by John Updike, and I noticed that it was written in a very different way than I was used to. Actually in some points I was really confused. His wording wasn’t clear to me sometimes. But the way that he used visual descriptions was new and original and I liked that very much. I could have read a whole book on his view of every day things.
I thought it was interesting when he described what is was like when “the Queen” looked at him. He said, “…it made my stomach rub on the inside of my apron…”(2) this was a very visual description and it was really a new and original way of describing what it is like to have your stomach churn.
I think that the story really doesn’t have a message. If it does it really is unclear to me. It just seems like he was simply telling you a story about one summer when he was a teenager. The girls that came into the store were strange, it seemed like the “Queen” was this confident person who knew exactly what she was doing all of the time and was used to people staring at her. But then at the end you see that this super confident leader figure can be reduced to a blushing teenager when confronted as to her attire.
I thought the boy’s reaction to what his boss did to the girls was way to extreme. It seemed like he knew exactly what the consequences of his actions were but he forged ahead anyways and then a minute after he made that decision he regretted it and knew that he was making things difficult for his family in the long run. I honestly don’t see as to why he didn’t think more about what he was really doing for those girls that he would probably never see again.
My “gut response” to this story is, “What? What just happened? Why did he make such a rash decision?” And I really don’t know why he really did any of that. It seems almost like he fell in love. Maybe that was the only reason for why he was acting so strangely.
There was a question asked in a little section after the story and one question that I noticed was basically “Are you offended by the language used in the story? As in how he described the “Queens” body?” And when I saw that it really made me look back and take a second look at what he had said about her. It didn’t particularly offend me, but I do think those observations were very sexual in nature. Describing her breasts as “…two scoops of vanilla...”(4) was a very good description for a story because it gave a very good visualization of her, but at the same time you also notice that all of the things he said about her seemed to almost turn him on.
Over all I was fairly confused by this story, it was written well visually but the plot, themes, ext. evaded me.

No comments:

Post a Comment