At the end of the story Sammy says, “And my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter” after quitting and walking out of A&P (Updike 21). The quote means that he is beginning to realize how hard life is going to be after making the decision to quit his job.

Updated August 02, 2019. In works of fiction, a round character is a significant player who is often the star of the story. This type of character encounters conflict and is changed by it. Round characters tend to be more developed than the flat characters, which are incidental.

A flat character is a character with little to no complex emotions, motivations, or personality. They also don’t undergo any kind of change to make them more well-rounded. In other words, they’re the opposite of a “round character,” who has a fully fleshed out profile and changes throughout the story.

– Sammy is a round and dynamic character because he has many character traits and he changes over the course of the story; he has an epiphany. An epiphany is a moment of sudden realization.

> Sammy quit his job in the story “A&P,” by John Updike, because he wanted to prove himself to be independent and get rid of his dependence on his parents. By quitting, Sammy had left his manager shocked and created problems for himself.

Shortly after the girls left the store Sammy advised Lengel, “I Quit.” Lengel tells Sammy he will regret quitting and Sammy knows he will; although, at the moment the only thing Sammy could think about was the way the girls blushed when Lengel embarrassed them in front of the store.…

In “A&P,” one could argue that Sammy did not make the right decision in quitting, because his decision didn’t achieve the ends he’d hoped it would. He didn’t get the attention of the girls, loses his job, and puts himself in an even more precarious position than he started in.

Sammy’s smile and the narrator’s diction of “lifeguard” lead me to expect Sammy to show his sympathy. Besides, “It just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there”, this metaphor that the author uses also shows Sammy’s admiration to those girls.

Lengel

• No. 1: Julius Caesar (100 B.C.-44 B.C.) Emperor, Roman Empire.
• No. 2: Qin Shi Huang (259 B.C.-210 B.C.) Emperor, Unified China.
• No. 3: Peter the Great (1672-1725)
• No. 4: Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
• No. 5: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
• No. 6: Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
• No. 7: The American president since 1945.

The moment in the story that brings the crisis is when the manager notices the girls checking out. The climax of “A&P” is when the girls are being belittled by the manager and Sammy tries to intervene; causing him to realize this job is not for him if that is how his manager treats people.

The bathing suits that the girls wear into the A&P are an emblem of the girls’ casual disregard of the social rules of the small town. They also represent the girls’ deliberate provocation, an attempt to attract the eye of every man they encounter.

The climax of the story is when the protagonist gets quite upset at his A&P manager for his treatment of Queenie and the rest of the bathing suit girls and quits his job in front of everyone. Plus, he is quite fed up already with his job, his manager, and everything around him.

In Stargirl, the climax is the scene where Susan returns from winning the public speaking contest expecting a hero’s welcome, and instead is greeted by only a handful of people. After that, Susan returns to her identity as Stargirl, and in her personal conflict between individuality and conformity, individuality wins.