An argumentative essay "A&P" by John Updike

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A&P by John Updike
A&P`s plot is pretty simple. Here is a teenager named Sammy, bored with working at the A&P. Three pretty girls wearing swim suits enter his workplace and causes commotion in the otherwise orderly store. The store manager Lengel sees the girls and reprimands them. Sammy tries to defend the girls and quits his job, hoping the girls will notice his heroism. But the girls leave as soon as they get out of the store and Sammy is left to wonder his fate. By looking at the context of this text, particularly the societal conditions when this essay was written, we see that A&P is actually a critique of the norms and social expectations of the time.
Reviews of A&P regard the essay differently. For example, William ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData" : { "author" : [ { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Peden", "given" : "William", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" } ], "id" : "ITEM-1", "issued" : { "date-parts" : [ [ "1964" ] ] }, "publisher" : "Houghton Mifflin", "publisher-place" : "Boston", "title" : "The American short story: Front line in the national defense of literature", "type" : "book" }, "uris" : [ "/documents/?uuid=201320f4-6c0d-4b73-ac9a-8f58535b02cf" ] } ], "mendeley" : { "manualFormatting" : "Peden", "previouslyFormattedCitation" : "(Peden)" }, "properties" : { "noteIndex" : 0 }, "schema" : "https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json" }Peden describes it as "a deftly narrated nonsense...which contains nothing more significant than a checking clerk's interest in three girls in bathing suits", regarding A&P as merely a story with no historical or political significance. It is important to note that Peden`s review came out only two years after the essay was published in the New Yorker, a period when "many Americans believed they were standing at the da...