ng their hero, and though his manager tries to dissuade him from disappointing his parents, Sammy feels "that once you begin a gesture, it's fatal not to go through with it" (196). He acts decisively, but the girls have disappeared from the parking lot by the time he exits the store. In practical terms, Sammy's action has gained him nothing and cost him everything, but his narrative affirms his gesture as a liberating form of dissent.3 Sammy does not see how he could have done otherwise, though he finds himself at odds with the only society he knows, sure that "the world will be hard to me, hereafter" (196).
             Because Updike wrote "A & P" for The New Yorker, the story assumes a reader whose response to Sammy can go far beyond what the character can articulate for himself 4 Walter Wells, calling attention to the elevated diction which concludes Sammy's highly "ambivalent" epiphany, suggests that "hereafter" points Sammy toward an indefinite future in which he may or may not find "viable alternatives" to a "defunct romanticism" (133). I hope to show in this essay that Updike offers the reader a way to see that Sammy's narrative, as a completed artistic gesture, is already in the mode of one of those alternatives. Sammy does look ahead as he senses the inadequacy of available cultural forms to express his sexuality and his moral sensitivity. Sammy does not, however, renounce the source of his will to act as he did. That source is triple: first, the ability to respond erotically to the beauty of a young woman's body; second, to respond sympathetically and imaginatively to the individual!
             person alive in that body; and third, to elaborate that double pleasure into expressive form. If Sammy has learned anything at the end of his story, he has learned it via his romantic desire which, though naive and selfdramatizing, drives the plot of "A & P." We can think of Sammy's narrative as Updike's gesture to give Eros a form that will both ennob...