A&P quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which literary movement best describes "A&P"?

   • Correct answer: Realism
   • Romanticism
   • Naturalism
   • Gothic
   • Modernism

   Realism fits best: Updike renders an ordinary supermarket and an ordinary nineteen-year-old with exact, unglamorized detail, trusting that everyday American life — not a heightened plot — can carry serious meaning.

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2. 2

   Question 2. What single item do the three girls come into the A&P to buy?

   • Suntan lotion and sunglasses for the beach
   • A carton of ice cream for a beach picnic
   • Correct answer: A jar of herring snacks for her mother
   • A case of cold soda bottles for that night's party

   The girls come in for exactly one item: a jar of Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream, which Queenie is buying for her mother. Nothing else about their visit involves shopping — the drama comes entirely from how they're dressed.

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3. 3

   Question 3. How much does the jar of herring snacks cost?

   • 39 cents
   • Correct answer: 49 cents
   • 59 cents
   • 69 cents

   The herring snacks cost 49 cents, which Queenie pays with a dollar bill she had folded up inside the top of her bathing suit.

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4. 4

   Question 4. Who is Lengel in "A&P"?

   • Correct answer: The store manager, who also teaches Sunday school
   • The butcher, who works behind the meat counter
   • Sammy's father, who owns the A&P franchise
   • A customer who complains loudly about the girls

   Lengel is the A&P's store manager, a serious, rule-minded man who also teaches Sunday school. He is the one who confronts the girls about their bathing suits and, later, tries to talk Sammy out of quitting.

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5. 5

   Question 5. What role does Sammy's coworker Stokesie play in the story?

   • A rebellious teenager who eggs Sammy on to quit the job too
   • The store's owner, who rarely visits the checkout floor
   • A former classmate of Sammy's who now works at the beach
   • Correct answer: A married coworker who hopes to become manager someday

   Stokesie is twenty-two, married with two kids, and jokes along with Sammy about the girls — but he has already settled into the conventional adult path, hoping one day to be manager himself. He's a quiet contrast to the choice Sammy makes.

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6. 6

   Question 6. What does Sammy mean when he calls the regular customers "sheep"?

   • Correct answer: Sammy's term for the ordinary customers going through habitual motions
   • A special discount item the A&P sells only on weekends
   • The nickname Lengel uses for new employees still in training
   • A brand of canned goods stocked in aisle three of the store

   Sammy's private word for the shoppers pushing their carts through the same habitual aisles, unaware and unquestioning, captures his adolescent contempt for conformity — even as the story quietly asks whether his own judgment is entirely fair.

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7. 7

   Question 7. Where does Queenie pull the dollar bill from to pay for the herring snacks?

   • From a purse she carries in one hand
   • Correct answer: From inside the top of her bathing suit
   • From a beach bag one of the other girls holds
   • From a pocket sewn into her shorts

   Queenie unfolds a dollar bill from inside the top of her bathing suit — a small, telling detail of how unprepared for a store, and how at ease in her own body, she is.

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8. 8

   Question 8. Why does Lengel stop the girls at Sammy's register?

   • He worries the girls will slip and fall on the wet floor barefoot
   • Correct answer: He tells the girls this isn't a beach and to dress properly
   • He suspects the girls are planning to shoplift something small
   • He is following a new corporate memo about weekend store hours

   Lengel plainly tells the girls that a supermarket isn't a beach and that they need to come back properly dressed next time — enforcing the store's unwritten code of propriety against their bathing suits.

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9. 9

   Question 9. How does Queenie react when Lengel tells the girls to dress properly?

   • Correct answer: She blushes and insists that they are, in fact, decently dressed
   • She apologizes at once and promises never to return to the store
   • She laughs it off and asks Sammy to intervene on her behalf
   • She ignores Lengel completely and keeps browsing the aisles

   Queenie blushes but pushes back, insisting that they are decent — a small act of dignity in an embarrassing public moment. It is her earlier line about her mother's herring snacks that first sends Sammy sliding down her voice into an imagined version of her living room.

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10. 10

    Question 10. What does the A&P store best symbolize in the story?

    • A place of dangerous chaos where accidents are common
    • A shrine to religious devotion, mirroring Lengel's Sunday school
    • Correct answer: A world of small conformities that the girls' arrival disrupts
    • A refuge from town life where nobody enforces any rules

    The A&P's aprons, bow ties, aisles, and policies embody a world of small, orderly conformities. The barefoot girls track summer and freedom into that order like visitors from another kingdom, and the story's whole drama grows from the collision.

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11. 11

    Question 11. What does "Initiation story" mean in this story?

    • A tale that ends with a wedding between the two main characters
    • Correct answer: A narrative in which a character crosses from innocence into a harder adult awareness
    • A story told entirely through a series of letters between friends
    • A myth explaining how a natural landmark first came into being

    An initiation story follows a character's passage from innocence toward a harder, more adult understanding of the world. Sammy's twenty minutes at the register end with exactly that kind of threshold-crossing.

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12. 12

    Question 12. What best describes why Sammy says "I quit"?

    • He has already decided in advance to quit if a dress code is ever enforced
    • Lengel fires him on the spot for talking back about the girls
    • He wants a permanent excuse to avoid working the register
    • Correct answer: A tangled mix of protest, attraction, and self-dramatization

    Updike keeps Sammy's motives deliberately mixed: real objection to Lengel's public shaming of the girls, adolescent desire, and a reach toward self-dramatic gesture all tangle together. Nobody fires him; he quits on impulse, hoping the girls will hear.

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13. 13

    Question 13. What does Sammy take off before he walks out of the store?

    • Correct answer: His apron and bow tie
    • His shoes and socks
    • His name tag only
    • His watch and belt

    Sammy folds his apron and drops the bow tie on top of it — the small uniform pieces marking him as an A&P employee — then punches the No Sale tab and steps out into the parking lot.

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14. 14

    Question 14. Do the three girls ever see or learn that Sammy quit his job?

    • Yes — Queenie turns back at the door and smiles warmly at Sammy
    • Correct answer: No — the girls are already gone by the time he leaves
    • Yes — Stokesie runs outside to tell them what Sammy did
    • No — Lengel stops Sammy before he can even say the words

    No. The girls hurry out of the store before Sammy's gesture even registers, and by the time he walks out to the parking lot, they are nowhere in sight. The whole point of his sacrifice goes unwitnessed by the very people it was meant to defend.

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15. 15

    Question 15. What does Lengel say to try to talk Sammy out of quitting?

    • That the union will refuse to reinstate him if he ever changes his mind
    • That he will owe the store money to repay the cost of his uniform
    • Correct answer: That he will feel this for the rest of his life, and that it will hurt his mother and father
    • That the other employees will surely resent him for causing a scene

    Lengel, who knows Sammy's parents, tells him "You'll feel this for the rest of your life" and says he doesn't want to do this to his mom and dad. Sammy hears him out — and quits anyway, feeling that a gesture once begun can't be taken back.

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16. 16

    Question 16. How does the theme of social class appear in the story?

    • Correct answer: Queenie's cocktail-party privilege against Sammy's plainer family life
    • Sammy's wealthy parents feel embarrassed by his job at the store
    • Lengel's quiet resentment that Sammy earns a higher hourly wage
    • Stokesie's growing jealousy over Sammy's better shift schedule at the register

    Overhearing Queenie's voice, Sammy imagines her parents hosting a cocktail party with herring snacks on toothpicks, set against his own family's plainer lemonade-and-beer gatherings. That imagined gap in privilege is part of what he's reaching toward when he quits.

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17. 17

    Question 17. How is "A&P" narrated?

    • Third-person omniscient, moving freely between every character's mind
    • A detached, camera-like narrator who never enters anyone's thoughts
    • An unreliable narrator who deliberately hides the truth from readers
    • Correct answer: First-person, in Sammy's slangy, colloquial voice, right after events happen

    Sammy tells the story himself, in a slangy, run-on, colloquial first-person voice, narrating just after the events occur. The voice performs his age — cocky and funny, unreliable in judgment, but exact in observed detail.

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18. 18

    Question 18. Where does the story's central irony lie?

    • Sammy is rewarded with a better job soon after quitting the store
    • Correct answer: The girls never see the gesture Sammy makes on their behalf
    • Lengel secretly agrees with Sammy but cannot say so publicly
    • The other customers applaud Sammy as he walks out the door

    The story's engine is the unwitnessed act: Sammy quits partly on the girls' behalf, but they are already gone and never see it. That gap between the grand gesture and its total lack of an audience turns near-romance into anticlimax — and anticlimax into meaning.

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19. 19

    Question 19. What does the story's final line suggest about Sammy?

    • He feels triumphant, certain he made the right choice with no doubts
    • He rushes back inside at once to beg Lengel for his job back
    • Correct answer: He senses, uneasily, that the adult world will be hard from now on
    • He feels nothing unusual at all and walks straight home for lunch as always

    Sammy's stomach falls as he senses how hard the world will be to him from here on. The line converts the scene's comedy into initiation: his real loss isn't a summer job, but a hard-eyed, unresolved glimpse of what standing on principle will cost him going forward.

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20. 20

    Question 20. "A&P" is often paired in classrooms with another initiation story whose ending it echoes in miniature. Which one?

    • Correct answer: "Araby" by James Joyce
    • "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
    • "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant
    • "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe

    Teachers often pair "A&P" with James Joyce's "Araby," another coming-of-age story that ends with a boy's sudden, deflating recognition about himself and the adult world — a small echo of the ending Updike gives Sammy.

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21. 21

    Question 21. Which of these events actually happened in the story?

    • Three girls walk into the A&P wearing bathing suits and no shoes.

      Happened

      This is exactly how Sammy first notices them, and why their presence causes a stir among the regular shoppers.

    • The girls come to the store to buy beach towels and sunscreen.

      Didn't happen

      They come in for a single item: a jar of herring snacks for Queenie's mother.

    • Lengel tells the girls a supermarket isn't a beach and they must dress properly next time.

      Happened

      This is exactly what prompts Sammy's reaction.

    • Queenie's real name is revealed near the end of the story.

      Didn't happen

      Queenie is only ever Sammy's private nickname for her; her actual name is never given.

    • Sammy quits his job at his own register, while the girls are on their way out of the store.

      Happened

      Sammy says "I quit" right at the register, hoping the girls will hear.

    • The girls are waiting outside to thank Sammy when he leaves the store.

      Didn't happen

      By the time Sammy reaches the parking lot, the girls are already gone.

    • Lengel reminds Sammy that his parents know him and will be affected by his choice.

      Happened

      Lengel brings up Sammy's parents while trying to talk him out of quitting.

    • The story ends with Sammy feeling certain that quitting was the easiest decision of his life.

      Didn't happen

      The story ends with an uneasy, unresolved feeling as Sammy senses how hard the world will be to him going forward — not certainty.

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