To a certain extent, “A&P” is not well written, at least in regard to what your English teachers have probably told you is acceptable grammar.  Yet we can assume that John Updike is far from illiterate and, therefore, is choosing to compose sentences like: “I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC, TO–it’s more complicated than you think, and after you do it enough, it begins to make a little song, that you hear words to, in my case “Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)!” the splat being the drawer flying out.”

Two things are going on here. One, Updike is creating verisimilitude; that is, bringing a sense of realism to the story. By seeing that Sammy is caught up in the minutiae of his job, even though it’s not important to theme, we have a greater sense of this being a real place and event. The other might be best seen in another example: “she kept her eyes moving across the racks, and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they all three of them went up the cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-rice-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft drinks-crackers-and-cookies aisle.” Again, we have Updike crafting the scene and telling us just what kind of grocery store this is (verisimilitude), but we also get a sense of Sammy’s character here. He’s casual in his tone and informal in his word choices and sentence constructions. The effect is that this is a young person, not of the upper class and not college educated. This contrasts a bit with who he thinks Queenie is.

Point of view: This story is classified as having a first person narrator, and one who is also the protagonist.  Sammy is a character in the story who tells us the story as he remembers it, with the emphasis on what he learned from the events.  Typically, when a short story has a first person narrator, we can count on that person also being the protagonist. However, a first person narrator does not know what other characters are thinking, they can only interpret and guess. (Sammy guesses wrong about Queenie. Feel free to consider this in your posts.) Therefore first person narrators are unreliable. That is, they may be telling us something incorrectly because they are limited to a single perspective.

Theme: Theme is the main idea of point of the story, but it’s rarely a simple point as it aims to recreate the complexity of life. One of the ideas in “A&P” is that our narrator/protagonist Sammy comes of age. This is true, but there’s more than that.  How does class-structure play a role?  Consider some important symbolism here: Sammy’s family drinks Schlitz Beer, while he imagine that Queenie’s drinks something like Martinis.  Another thing to consider for your posts is looking at how does the comparison of alcoholic beverages characterize each character’s class standing? 

read this passage A&P http://www.tiger-town.com/whatnot/updike/ and write about it