Gullivers Travels
Gulliver’s TravelsIn John Updike’s descriptive short story, A & P, Sammy’s personality is described in the way he reacts to his job and the people around him. We know that he is the narrator of the story and that he is telling it in first person. So, we are in his head in a sense. The story makes it easy for us to understand the way he thinks. We get that understanding through the way he describes and reacts to the other characters.
Sammy is portrayed as an average teenage guy who probably doesn’t like his job all that much. He proves it in a lot of ways. When he is not busy checking out customers, he leans on the register in boredom, waiting for something to happen. His boredom is what leads him into describing the three girls who walked in. He also describes the store in a bad way, making it out to be a boring place. His job makes him feel like he’s trapped and stuck in his little check-out slot. He displays these feelings by the way he reacts to the other characters. For example, the way that he talked about the old woman, whom he had encountered, was pretty mean When the lady popped off at him for ringing her crackers up twice, he kept his feelings away from her, but let us know what he thought of her. He said that she looked like a witch and would’ve been accused as one if she lived in Salem at that time. He couldn’t have made a sudden outburst, because he knew he would lose his job. It wasn’t worth losing his job over one lady griping at him. It just wasn’t enough to make him explode.
He is a very artistic person, too. The way he describes the girls is extremely detailed. He puts his words in a way that enables the audience to clearly visualize what is going on in the story. He does this by using descriptive tools like metaphors and similes to describe them. One example is...
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