“A&P,” written by John Updike, is a short story in which the narrator, Sammy, recounts the events that occur at his workplace after three girls wearing swimsuits enter the store. Sammy is a typical 19-year-old who works at an A&P grocery store as a cashier in a conventional town where he has become accustomed to observing customers and assuming things about their lives. In the story, Sammy uses colloquial and descriptive language to demonstrate his relationships and attitudes toward other characters, making us sympathize with him and see him as observant, critical, selfish, impulsive, and vulnerable. In the first half of the story, before interacting with the three girls, Sammy presents himself as a normal boy as he uses informal language to give detailed descriptions of customers and express his feelings about his life and work. Using the first-person point of view, Sammy begins the story by recounting the moment he meets the girls, observing them closely and noting small details about their physical appearance and actions. For example, he explains that the girls walked, "letting the weight shift to their toes as if testing the ground with each step, putting a little extra deliberate action into it"; names them “Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony”; and describes them respectively as "the queen", "the stocky child" and the tall one with a "chubby berry face". Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Sammy appears to be very critical as he juxtaposes the three young girls with former clients; for example, he praises Queenie's beauty but criticizes a client who is "a fifty-year-old witch with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows." By providing these descriptions of pretty girls and unattractive customers, Sammy tricks the reader into seeing him as an observant and overly critical character who, like any other young man, has a positive attitude and perception towards cute customers. Additionally, Sammy uses metaphors in the story to refer to customers as "sheep", "household slaves", and "pigs in a chute", implying that they are followers in a uniformed town , and he is different and superior to them because they do not share the same outlook on life: all the clients behave conservatively and consider the girls' actions unacceptable — this is seen when they look "around them after pushing their carts to make sure what they saw was correct” — while Sammy has a liberal behavior, which he cannot express openly due to his egocentric opinions that no character understands, and views the girls' actions as a form of expression. This shows that Sammy is a critical and selfish character as he views his conventional town as a place where everyone conforms to established rules, acting and thinking the same way; the reader can understand Sammy's feelings because he is a reluctant character who is somehow unhappy with his life. Additionally, Sammy explains that his co-worker Stokesie is "married with two babies" and "is going to be a manager one sunny day, maybe in 1990." He includes this detail about his co-worker because, unlike Stokesie, he does not doesn't see working at the store in the future, suggesting that he is a selfish character who deserves more and feels trapped in a job he doesn't like. In other words, in this part of the story, Sammy uses basic language to show his relationships with other.