Behind the stories

               When you read a story you automatically interpret what you read and it usually makes you feel something unique to you that someone else reading it may not have felt. That is the one of the main purposes of a story to evoke feeling, but sometimes it is also to portray an underlying concept or idea. This idea or value to the reader is not always easily seen and so you have to break the story down into parts that you can understand and eventually see what the author is saying. The breaking down of a story can be done usually in three main parts: the ingredients such as plot, length, characters, and time; the process in which the writer structures the piece or story; and the made thing such as the moral or value the story portrays to the reader. So taking this notion of breaking stories down, we can see a lot more of the ideas and concepts portrayed when we tear apart the story and poems we have been reading in class “A&P” by John Updike and the two Sharon Olds poems, “Rites of Passage” and “The Girl at the Boys’ Party”.

         When I read “A&P”, the story did not really do much for me and all I saw was a boy quitting his job in a noble but vain way to get the attention of a girl that he liked. But then I broke it down and it is so much more than that. Updike uses the setting of the boy, Sammy, working in a small town grocery store to build on the uniqueness of the situation that was occurring. He uses the characters Sammy and Queenie to display the trope, or common theme, of the rich girl/ poor guy that many readers have heard of which gives you a familiarity with the story. Referring to all the other shoppers as sheep shows the conformity of the time in which he wrote the book and that Sammy standing up for the girl was an act of rebellion against that conformity. He also expresses a sense of vain heroism in relation to Sammy, which to me is trying to tell the reader that sometimes acts of heroism do not always get rewarded.

          Sharon Olds’ poem “Rites of Passage” seemed similar to “A&P” in the sense that I thought this poem was really just about a mother admiring her little boy standing up for the sake of his birthday party and ending a dispute between his friends. But when I broke it down I saw how Olds used so many metaphors and similes comparing the likeness of the little boys to men. She refers to the young boys as “short men”, generals, and small bankers and uses irony with the fight and “violence” in the setting of the birthday party. The fact that she describes the son as a mother or parent gives us the feel of a parent/child relationship. She uses the conversation of the young boys to build the rest of the poem around, which she structures each line as boy, man, boy, man. Ultimately giving the reader the idea that Olds’ sees men as boys and boys as men. An underlying sense of conformity can also be seen in this poem in the way the little boys are trying to all fit in amongst one another at the party.

          Both of these pieces show a great deal of underlying conformity and the same is with “The Girl at the Boys’ Party”. Olds’ poem is about a girl who is trying to fit in at an all boy party while remaining calm and collected just doing math in her head. But when you break it down you see that she uses the math as a play on words to describe the situation at hand. Referring to the little girl as “indivisible as a prime number” saying that she is basically untouchable and she says, “and in her head she’ll be doing her wild multiplying” which makes us think that she really isn’t thinking about math at all. And she infers how the boys at the party might see the girl when she makes reference to the girl’s bathing suit as food. She uses all this to give the reader a feeling of perhaps a parent witnessing this scene of a coming of age in the child’s life. Both of Sharon Olds’ poems give the reader a sense of how the parent feels in each situation, while in “A&P” you get to witness the characters feelings first hand.

Word Count(770)