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1. What is the setting of the story "A and P"?

The setting of the story is a grocery store called the A and P. The store is in an unnamed town north of Boston. The town is five miles from the beach and has a sizable population, since from

2. Who is the protagonist of the story "A and P"?

The protagonist of the story remains unnamed until the very last part of the story, but due to the brevity of the story, the entirety of this guide refers to the protagonist as Sammy. However, the reader knows many other things about the protagonist at this point in the story, including that he is 19 and that he works in a grocery store. He does not share Stokesie's ambition to move up within the grocery company.

3. What is Sammy's purpose for using a historical allusion in Paragraph 1?

While talking about the nasty customer on whom he is waiting when the young women enter the store, Sammy says that if the woman had been alive at a different time in history, "they would have burned her over in Salem" (1). Sammy both shows his lack of historical knowledge, since witches were hung in Salem, rather than being burned, and demonstrates his strong dislike of older women such as the customer at hand.

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