Dessner is Professor of English at the University of Toledo. He specializes in Victorian literature and creative writing. In the following essay, Dessner presents insight into the character of Sammy, whom the critic believes does not realize what his real troubles in life will be.

John Updike's short story "A & P" first published in The New Yorker and then in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962), has become something of a classic of college literature anthologies, and no doubt the story's brevity and its outrageously naive yet morally ambitious teen-age hero have much to do with that status. Part of the story's appeal, too, derives from the fact that the wild comedy of its boisterously inventive and rebellious narrator modulates at its end into a gentle but benign sobriety. Moments after Sammy dramatically surrenders his job at the cash register to protest the unchivalrous treatment of the three...