True Hero In John Updike's A & P

First there is Wolfshiem's betrayal of Gatsby; while he feels remorse for the death of Gatsby he refuses to become involved because the true remorse he feels truly isn't the loss of Gatsby but the loss of Gatsby's wealth claiming “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.” This is more explicitly shown when Klipspringer calls Nick, not to arrange to attend Gatsby's Funeral but to get his tennis shoes back proving he truly doesn’t care in the slightest about Gatsby but simply the material wealth that represented Gatsby. The only characters to attend Gatsby’s funeral where those who had loyalty built not on material bonds but a much stronger bond of respect and appreciation for the man he was not the man he had become. This proves the Fitzgeralds point of how fragile and carefully built loyalty must

This leads me to believe that believe that Sammy is not a victim. It was his own fault that he lost his job. Although Updike and Oates both choose to put the protagonist in danger, they contrasted on whether it was the protagonist 's own fault for being in danger. Both Updike and Oates use similar protagonist problems to build both stories around the struggle of adolescents. In “Where are you going, where have you been?”

Quitting his job was a spontaneous decision he made to protect his ego. Lengel calls out “you don 't want to do this” but Sammy keeps walking (Updike 5). Sammy’s stubbornness to admit he’s wrong can be interpreted by the quotation: “It 's true, I don ' t. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it 's fatal not to go through with it” (Updike 5).

His father Unoka was quoted “in his day was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow”. Basically saying he didn’t care about his life, so in what possible way could he have cared for Okonkwo’s. And his wife Ekwefi he didn’t technically shoot. He didn’t kill so there might have been sympathy there because she was completely defenseless and didn’t die so you can tell he intentionally didn’t kill her.

For example, as Huck reminisces his feats with Jim he says, “and for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that too” (214). Huck holds onto Jim as a father figure who accepted and cared from him when others did not accept who he was. The civilized world robbed Jim of his freedom and Huck realized that skin and race do not translate into love, companionship, and friendship. Racism is not a playing factor in this story in fact it is anti-racism that leads the two most unlikely individuals to become friends. In addition, Ralph Waldo Ellison once said, "Huckleberry Finn knew, as did Mark Twain, that Jim was not only a slave but a human being and a symbol of humanity... and in freeing Jim.

As this example indicates, in this society they have absolutely no control or choice of who they marry and live with for the rest of their life. Second, Jonas’s community cannot say love because it’s wrong. In addition the society cannot feel love to anyone or anything. One night Jonas and his parents were talking. Suddenly Jonas asks do you love me?His parents say it is wrong to say love and respond to the question with a no.

He did not like that and so we argued more but then he finally got the hint each time something would happen and I would mouth off to him. I cannot have respect for a man who cuts out his kids just to impress his new girlfriend, I cannot do it.

‘Well, you don’t run things around here,’ says the boss. ‘You’re a fool,’ said Wynand. He lost the job.” (402). He sees no reason to listen to other’s methods of doing things when he knows perfectly well that he is the most capable of composing efficient ideas for himself and those around him.

Everyone, except for Cash, begins to think he is mad when in reality he tried to “hide her away from the sight of man” (215). Cash saw this in Darl thinking that “Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way” (233) Cash is the only person in the Bundren family who saw Darl going to the mad-house as a good thing without having to hide their “inner truth.” Cash said Darl going away from the family “is better so for him. This world is not his world; this life his life”

Charley: “Why don 't you want to work for me?” Willy: I’ve got a job”(96). Even though shortly after got done telling Charley how he lost his job, he was still refusing to take his offer. This is showing how a dream is a release for Willy, to forget about his stresses of getting fired. Rather than accepting these facts, he ignores them by refusing Charley’s offer.

I also do not think it is right how he just let some of the employees go without talking to them. One of the employees in the movie was let go years ago and never told, but due to an error that employee still got paid. When the error was found he never took the employee aside to talk to him. Mr. Lumbergh’s assistant was told just to keep telling the employee that he was busy and would find time to talk to him eventually. That type of behavior is unacceptable.

1. Based on the dialogue Sammy uses, one can suspect he does not take himself too seriously. He speaks from a first person point of view which portrays him as a quiet observer. Sammy also seems to be slightly shallow because when he is referring to the girls in bathings suits inside the store he notes, the girl that initially caught his attention was the “chunky” girl in plaid. In addition to his shallowness, Sammy uses harsh words such as “the fat one with the tan sort of fumbled the cookies.”

A major theme in A&P is personal freedom. Throughout the story Updike uses metaphor for all elements in the story to implies the theme. At the beginning of the story, Sammy uses sarcastic tone to describe the customers as “sheep” and “houseslaves” which implies he is different from them in mindset. The way how Sammy talks about others shows his intellectual mind. He is not same as Stokesie who wants to be a manager one day.