Sammy: The Old and The New

Sammy: The Old and the New

Many people go through life without meeting their own version of “Queenie”, and others may experience an event rather than a person as their “switch” to turn on the preverbal light. In John Updike’s “A & P”, Sammy seems like a boy who is content with his life and his accomplishments before the three girls enter the store and into his life. The girl’s experience in the store helps him to eventually realize that his destiny is not sitting behind a cash register waiting on unhappy middle aged women. Queenie is Sammy’s inspiration to take that “calculated risk” for the first time in his short life: Therefore, he is ready to take on the world’s unknown challenges. Sammy, the narrator of “A & P”, begins to evolve from a sheep into a shepherd the minute he lays eyes on his “Queenie”.

Sammy’s life is like the character that Bill Murray plays in the movie “Groundhog Day”, where Murray relives that fateful day over and over again. Sammy is stuck, frozen in time, waiting to be released. Kerry Michael Wood agrees that, “Sammy will somehow transcend the sheep-like customers who live five miles from the beach and haven’t seen the ocean in twenty years and the baggy-pants-wearing purchasers of giant cans of pineapple juice. He will not remain in the provincial town with two banks, a Congregational church, three real estate offices, and chronic sewer problems.”(5) Sammy himself pokes fun at some of the patrons taking on herd-like characteristics as they line up at the register waiting for further instructions. Although he does not realize it, Sammy is in that line also, unable to break free from the herd.

It is obvious from Sammy’s vivid descriptions that initially he is focused on the physical aspect of the girls and shows how easily hormones can take over a nineteen year-old male’s mind, only to be magnified with the beginning of the “sexual revolution” of the early 1960’s. Throughout the encounter Greg Bentley suggests, at first sight of the girls Sammy’s libido is in overdrive followed by a sense of pity and empathy as the girls exit the store (7). Even in the traditional households of the early 60’s, his chauvinistic attitudes were not widely accepted. Several comments made by Sammy in John Updike’s “A & P” solidify his inferior view of females; describing one of the three girls as they first enter the store, Sammy states, “She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit” (5). Describing Queenie for the first time during the encounter, Sammy questions whether girls have the mental capacity to process information and transfer that information to their feet to modify their own swagger.

Presumably Sammy comes from a middle-class family and works out of necessity