Free College Essays - Lusting After Ladies at the A&P :: A&P Essays

Does lust lead to hardship and emptiness? In this paper (do you mean "this paper" or "John Updike's 'A&P'?) Sammy has a sexual appetite that causes him problems. His worship of a woman's (careful with placement of possessive apostrophe) body causes him to misplace his values and center only on one value. This value is his lustful pleasure he gets when he sees three girls in their skimpy swimsuits. The pleasure he receives outweighs the consequence of emptiness he finally feels after he defends those girls and they do not respond to his pleasurable feelings. Updike in his short story "A&P" uses characterization to illustrate that heroics based upon animalistic sexual appetite, which objectifies women, will lead to a hard and unsuccessful life. Updike uses the characterization of Sammy to illustrate that animalistic sexual appetite objectifies women. Sammy describes Queenie in a sexual manner when he described (try to avoid using the same word twice in a single sentence; try a synonym--to find synonyms there's a cool thesaurus webcite by Merrium Webster at www.m-w.com; also note that you have shifted from present to past tense here; when writing on art you normally stay in the present tense throughout) Queenie's body and bathing suit. He says (missing the proper punctuation after says; if you kept your Holt handbook you should be able to look up punctuation with quotations) "With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light" (13). (don't forget that MLA style demands that you put the page number of each quote in parentheses immediately af ter each quote) Sammy describes this as more than pretty. His sexual appetite is geared in not seeing these three girls as people but as objects. Sammy sees these women as icons to lust after just like in an eastern orthodox church where they have icons of Jesus and Mary that you can have as objects to focus on and worship. Sammy in effect is using these women as objects to lust after and thus worship human sexuality. He sees these women as objects of pleasure thus fueling his animalistic sexual appetite. (I have a couple of comments on the preceding passage--which I've colored blue.