Sammy certainly seems to think of himself as more aware than the majority of the customers in the A&P, as he refers to many of them as "sheep," and he is especially interested in the girl he calls "Queenie" who seems to be the ringleader of her group. She seems very aware as well, and he identifies her with queenliness and even refers to her legs as "prima donna" at one point. He believes that she thinks that "the crowd that runs the A&P must look pretty crummy." Perhaps he is aware that many feel this way and so he makes himself feel better by calling them "sheep" or referring to one lady as a "witch" who would have been "burned [...] over in Salem." His class status is revealed, in part, by sentences like,
She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but she didn't tip. Not this queen.
His phrasing of the first sentence is awkward, and his second isn't even a full, grammatical sentence. Even "she didn't tip" feels colloquial; tip what? Her hand, figuratively? Tip over? We can see that he means that she didn't react, but his choice of words betrays a relative lack of education and lower status. His final realization in the end, that the girls do not care about his act of chivalry and how difficult his quitting is going to make his life, seem to indicate his lower status and limited opportunity.
Another example of a sentence in “A & P” by John Updike that is grammatically tangled but makes sense colloquially is the one that comprises the entire sixth paragraph:
You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.
This sentence definitely gets its point across; the speaker, Sammy, is spun around by a girl he’s nicknamed “Queenie” who is sauntering with her group of friends through the grocery store in a revealing bathing suit. However, the structure of the sentence is so formatted in such a stream-of-consciousness style that it could use some editing. Of course, we don’t edit our thoughts for grammar and clarity, so the way Updike has constructed the sentence mirrors the internal thoughts of a young man in an overwhelming but exciting situation. Sammy’s thoughts are coming so quickly that he can’t seem to get ahead of them in a more logical or orderly way.
The first sentence of the second paragraph is another example of language that makes sense when comparing it to spoken English but isn't a great written sentence. It's a really long and choppy sentence with loads of commas and dashes. Content-wise, it moves all over the place too. I think Sammy's language does two main things. First, it shows that he believes he's better than just about everybody in the store. His descriptions of Lengel and the customers are never positive. He refers to the customers in general as sheep. That's not a flattering comparison, because sheep are generally considered some of the dumbest animals ever. Unfortunately, Sammy's language shows that he isn't exactly a powerhouse of intelligence and maturity either. He sexually objectifies just about everything about the girls, and his metaphors tend to be simplistic and based on common, concrete objects. It seems he just isn't capable of higher-order thinking, language, and organization.
With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.
No comments:
Post a Comment