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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Updike’s writing style in “A&P” is both conversational and lyrical. The story is told from the first-person perspective of a working-class 19-year-old named Sammy whose narration features grammatical errors and run-on sentences alongside rich descriptions and figurative language. These aspects of Updike's style come across in the following passage, which comes near the end of the story as Sammy rings Queenie up, taking from her a dollar bill she has just pulled out of the top of her bathing suit:
I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.
The winding, run-on nature of this sentence conveys the sort of informal and conversational tone that a teenager like Sammy might use when speaking. Likewise, his description of Queenie’s breasts as “the two smoothest scoops of vanilla” sounds like something he might say to his coworker Stokesie as they banter and objectify the girls together.
The more lyrical elements of this passage—such as Sammy’s descriptions of Queenie’s “narrow pink palm” and of how he “twist[s] the neck” of the bag he puts her purchase in—complicate Sammy’s colloquial style. These sorts of flourishes are demonstrative of Updike’s more literary style and communicate that, though Sammy is, in many ways, a typical 19-year-old boy, he is able to see and notice details that other people cannot. This is one of the many ways that Updike imparts the message that someone’s outer appearance and inner life may be very different from each other.
Related Themes:
