Reaction to John Updike Interview

In John Updike's short story "A & P", we see a picture of a teenage boy, Sammie, as some sort of "hero." John Updike got the idea of this story from a real life experience of seeing a woman in a bathing suit walk into an A & P one day. Some of the characters names came from people in John Updike's life who seemed similar to the characters in his story. I think that it helps my perception of the story in knowing that the names and such were picked out of Updike's real life experiences. It makes the story more real to me even though I do not personally know the people. The way that Updike explained and spoke the lines of Sammy in his interview made me like Sammy more. At first, my perception of Sammy was that he was kind of a coward for only quitting because he wanted the girls to notice him; however, now I feel like even though his reasons for quitting were kind of shallow, he has taken a step out into the real world now, and I can see the look of sadness on his face when he now has to face the whole town who knows that he quit, and he doesn't even have the girls.