stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter." This final line of John Updike's short story "A&P" reveals the importance of point-of-view to the story. The narrator is a teenager working in a grocery store, the titular A&P supermarket, as a summer job. He asserts his individuality and self-confidence during a defining incident in the story, in which he is asked either to keep his mouth shut and therefore keep his job; or to speak up on behalf of some girls who is boss embarrassed. The precipitating incident reveals much about the speaker's character, and the story would have been completely different if it were told from the point-of-view of the girls or of Lengel, the store manager. "A&P" is a coming of age story, and the first person point-of-view allows the reader to understand an adolescent's perspective of issues...
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