le and extend it as an aesthetic pleasure-while intensifying the impossibility of that desire's completing itself in anything other than art. In other words, Updike has created in Sammy a character who attains the awareness of a modern artist, but who does not know that is what he has done.
             To a large extent, the aesthetic pleasure in "A & P" depends upon the reader's sensing this dramatic irony. Sammy's words resonate and gain meaning through a larger artistic context out of which he comes (Updike's knowledge and imagination) but of which he, the fictive character, is unaware. Updike offers the reader this particular irony through a playful and highly specific allusion to a work of art and to the corresponding modern aesthetic criticism it helped inspire. That allusion, unconscious on Sammy's part but certainly not on Updike's, is to Sandro Botticelli's fifteenth-century Neo-Platonic painting, usually referred to as The Birth of Venus (c. 1482). In design, the painting recalls a medieval triptych, but its central figure is the Greek goddess of lov
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