Blog Question #4:

I chose John Updike's "A & P" to discuss point-of-view.  Maybe it appealed to me because I remember those stores.  They were homey and smelled of coffee beans.  So this story was made easier to picture given my memories.

It's told in first person with the voice of a teenage boy.  This voice gives "A & P" its realism.  Third person just wouldn't have had the impact of:  "She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, were the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs."  The reader can see the teenage boy with his eyes bugging out.  A third-person narrator would have sounded a bit perverted.  But not a teenage boy.

This teenage boy gives us a fly-on-the-wall picture of happenings in the store.  Nothing seems to escape his voracious eyes.  Then he surprises the reader by jumping into the scene himself, taking his knight-in-shiny-armor stance and quitting his job even though he knows he will regret it.  And he tells the reader:  "my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter."  This kind of insight just wouldn't have been so personal and heartfelt from a third person narrator.