John Updike’s use of common colloquial words depicts Sammy as a normal emotionally confused teenager walking the fine line between boyhood and manhood. This gives him a distinctive voice which is simple yet powerful. “A & P”, written in the first person point of view, provides total subjectivity and all the immediacy, intimacy and urgency of Sammy’s individual conflicts. This allows Updike to write in a voice that Sammy would use if he were a real person. Sammy’s simplistic colloquial descriptive words, such as “ sweet broad soft-looking can” (802) and “joints” (804), all allow Updike not only to portray Sammy as a stereotypical teenager in terms of his behavior and attitude but also makes it possible to humanize the first-person narrator. Updike makes the first-person narrator so effective because he allows the reader to identify with Sammy. Updike refrains from using polysyllabic or archaic words to make his story difficult to comprehend, but instead uses simplistic diction, which allows anyone and everyone to understand what he wants to convey. When Updike uses extremely colloquial connotative words like “witch” (802) and “bums” (804) to describe adult customers, he makes the reader recognize Sammy’s rejection and disgust for adult authority and thus making the reader empathize with him, especially when he strongly describes “the three girls in nothing but bathing suits.” (802). Updike’s diction invokes a strong sense of realism in Sammy and therefore the reader can readily recognize the hopes, fears, concerns and ambitions of the protagonist. Updike very skillfully through diction, extenuates the setting, conflict and theme but also portrays his characters in such a way that they seem to have lives beyond the strict boundaries of the mere short story.
Although John Updike openly displays simplistic style, simultaneous he is also able to employ the use of complex sentence structure, which not only adds another facet to Sammy’s personality but also allows Updike to make Sammy the perfect unsung hero. John Updike’s complex style uses long, elaborate sentences that contain many ideas and descriptions, which are perfect contrasts to the simple sentences that are however more prevalent in his work. The periodic complex sentences that Updike employs for description, highlights the protagonist’s thoughts, feelings, conflicting impulses and capacity for change and this creates a strong first-person narrator. Such sentences also vividly describe the setting of the short story; descriptions that might have been lost had Updike relied completely on the spare, economical simplistic style. When Updike describes the “bright green” (802) swimsuit whose “seams … were still sharp”(802), the “black hair that hadn’t quite frizzed right” (802) and the “chubby berry-faces” (802) – he not only shows Sammy’s infatuation with the “three girls in nothing but bathing suits” (802) but also gives the reader a dramatic description of the characters and their surroundings. At the same time he also uses complex sentences to give insight into the protagonist’s mind thus creating the desired mood in the reader, whether it is one of joy, sadness, confusion or of any other emotion. The neutral tone that Updike uses throughout the first half of the short story is severely contrasted to the strong feelings of both sympathy and courage that he invokes in the later parts. When Sammy “slid right down her voice into her living room” (804) and remembers “how … the pretty girl blush made me [Sammy] so scrunchy inside”, the reader finally gets insight as to how Sammy goes beyond his adolescent sexual fascinations to finally taking a mature firm stand and becoming a reluctant hero. This realization is strongly aided by Updike’s exceptional use of syntax.
The extreme importance of style and the many aspects associated with it such as word choice and syntax is revealed very clearly in “A & P”, especially when John Updike elaborates on the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of the main character and narrator of the short story. In the large scope of things, we see that style is just another tool craftily used by authors such as John Updike to support and complement the main elements of their literary masterpieces. Updike’s style in “A & P” is brilliant and magnificent, because we see how he is able to enliven the story just through his choice of words and masterful structuring of his sentences. John Updike is this short story, has more than proven that idiosyncratic style is absolutely crucial and fundamental to any good piece of literary work.
