A&p and Greasy Lake

English 1302

Huy Ngo

Response Essay

“A&P” and “Greasy Lake”

Represent for the theme of portrayal of human conflicts and the need to conform, we have two main character from two different story. Sammy from the “A & P” and the narrator from “The Greasy Lake”. Both of them are young man in the age of nineteen, immature, but conform in completely different way and situation

In the beginning of both story, I saw two young immature man. Sammy, the cashier of A&P, saw the beauty of a woman for the first time. Things that he could never see in his dream, above the surface of his pure mind and he acted like nothing he ever did before. The unnamed narrator, found a new self within his mind, greasy, scary and uneasy.

From the 60s to the 80s, youth were tempted to rebel, to conform themselves. But it’s just too soon for them to look at the world, they fell right after they stood up, some fell in the process of stepping up. And then, people grow up, they saw themselves in the past as a clown. This is the first point of conflict I want to talk about. Sammy stood up to talk for the girls, it’s not wrong but he needs to think more carefully about how he’s going to act after that. “I look around for my girls, but they’re gone, of course… And my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me from here on in.” (A&P, Page 144-145).Quitting the job doesn’t mean Queenie would become his girlfriend. It doesn’t mean that he came up with something new and brilliant that could save his career. The Greasy Narrator stood up in his mind, tried to prove that he’s a bad boy, a cool kid but what he became was a guilty man, a criminal. He was going around looking for the “fun” place with his buddy and all of them ended up as murderers, almost rapists. “I came at him and brought the tire iron down across his ear. He was a stunt man. He collapsed. Wet his pants. Went loose in his boots… Before we could pin her to the hood of the car, our eyes masked with lust and greed and the purest primal badness.” (Greasy Lake, Page 191) Running around, hiding, looking for an escape, it’s just pathetic.

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