A & P Theme

            The running theme which links the bulk of the story's incidents repeatedly demonstrates Sammy's inability to imagine himself.
             personally at risk. The expectation this motif awakens in us is that Sammy will continue to underrate the world's dangers. At the story's end, however,he surprises us by overrating them--although with ludicrous and touching.
             selectivity. .
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             The first of these dangers to present itself to Sammy is either penury or a neurotic meanness of spirit. The middle-aged customer who gives Sammy "hell" for ringing up her box of crackers twice is in Sammy's quick calculation, "about fifty," and a "witch" of the sort he's learned once flourished in nearby Salem. He notices the "rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows" but nothing else that might stir him in the direction of sympathy. That the malicious intent he silently accuses her of, and the "sheep"-like behavior, "like scared pigs in a chute," of the other "houseslaves in pin curlers" who draw his sarcastic ire, might have sources in something other than the one's motiveless malignity and the others' dullness of character, does not occur to Sammy. He calls the "pigs" "scared" as if he himself had never.
             known fear, as if no one ever had, as if "scared" were a term of opprobrium. He blames the customers of his A & P for being "houseslaves" without any sensitivity to the misfortunes of literal or metaphoric slavery the epithet points to. The thought that his mother, or his wife to be, might herself deserve something more generous than loathing for having "varicose veins [like those] mapping [the shoppers'] legs" does not break the shell of the boy' s innocence. .
             Nor does he know, or care about, the circumstances that might lead one "himself for instance--to a career as a laborer in the city's Department of Streets and Sewers. The men who have come to such employment are to hint nothing more than "old freeloaders." Similarly, the "old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up [to his checkout lane] with four giant cans of pineapple juice" evokes in Sammy nothing more than the thoroughly self-satisfied question, "what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice? I've often asked myself.