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When Moral Decisions and the Workplace Meet: More Show than Substance

Sammy sums up the situation well in the aftermath of quitting his job in a fit of moral

outrage at the A & P in John Updike’s 1961 short story of that name when he says “my stomach

kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter” (Updike, 2004). Even

as he quit, he wrestled with the decision, really made more out of an extension of his lustful

fantasies than true moral outrage. He knew his boss, Mr. Lengel, was disappointed in him and

that his parents would be as well and that it may be hard to explain his reason for leaving the job

to prospective employers in the future. The immediate future that summer was bound to be tough

with much less spending money at his disposal and lots of empty days to now fill. Is quitting a

reasonable job ever smart, given that no one there is abusive and you do not have another job

lined up? Sammy made a choice and will have to live with the consequences. His outlook would

have been much more positive if he, in quitting, was really making a statement that could help to

right some wrong in the universe.

Work at the A & P is pretty routine and not too difficult; it is really ideal for the summer

for someone with bigger dreams for the future like Sammy. He enjoys joking around with co-

workers like the slightly older Stokesie about things like the appearance of the three girls who

come into the store in bikinis, even though it is clear that Sammy is sure he will never end up

stuck as a lifer at the A & P like his coworker, tied down by a family at a young age. Sammy also

enjoys people-watching and a grocery store is ideal for that, with foot traffic wearing a path in

and out all day long and the scenery ever-changing. He makes some clever observations about

the shoppers, like the women from town who are “house-slaves in pin curlers” (Updike, 2004).

Working at the A & P is not part of Sammy’s big dream for his life, and his action at the end of

the story when he quits is as much a protest against Mr. Lengler’s scolding of the bikini girls as it

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is a rebellion by Sammy against the small-town, middle-class lifestyle that too often includes

toiling away in a job that holds little meaning. Sammy’s views on work when he is just nineteen

years old are likely to change over his life, but as a teenager just breaking out of the mold of a

childhood into adulthood, one workplace is not a cage strong enough to hold him. There is life

beyond the fluorescently lit atmosphere in the A & P, real life with people who are not trapped in

such a dull existence, people like Sammy.

Quitting this job is not without complications, however, because Sammy’s parents are

friends with Mr. Lengler. And how can Sammy possibly explain his reason for quitting to them?

Mr. Lengler’s admonishment of the bikini girls was not overly harsh, and Sammy himself knew

that bathing suits and bare feet was not appropriate grocery store attire, thinking to himself when

he first saw the girls that “they didn't even have shoes on” (Updike, 2004). Sammy could not

very well tell his parents he was so distracted by the sight of the mostly unclothed, nubile teen

girl flesh that he made a rare-for-him error at the checkout and was given a hard time by a

customer. Moral outrage would be an explanation that his parents would surely have no trouble

sniffing out the implausibility of because they knew Mr. Lengler and he would not do anything

that might embarrass a customer without a strong reason for doing so. But while Sammy can

freely tell Stokesie, “hold me tight” as if he might faint at the site of those bikinis and tan lines,

he is going to have to come up with a better reason for quitting for his parents, and moral

indignation was about all he could come up with.

What exactly constitutes a good reason for moral indignation? Even Sammy knows that

his excuse for quitting was a little lame. He followed through with it once he made up his mind

mainly because “it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it”

(Updike, 2004). Morality is hard to define, and this is evidenced in the words of many different

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different philosophers and writers. On Morality is an essay by the writer Joan Didion in which

she discusses using morality as a social code. Morality is not just a social code that can be used

to influence behavior, she writes, but is also linked to spirituality and conscience and has an

instinctive rooting in each of us (1965). Didion argues that “I want to be quite obstinate about

insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—

what is “right” and what is “wrong” (Didion, 1965). In her essay, Didion describes staying at a

hotel in Death Valley where she heard about an automobile accident the previous night in which

the intoxicated motorist died. A passerby stayed many hours with the deceased motorist while

his wife, who was a nurse, drove the injured girlfriend of the driver to a doctor. The nurse told

Didion that "You can’t just leave a body on the highway” because “it’s immoral” (Didion, 1965).

Did some kind of moral reasoning make that person feel the need to stay with a corpse?

Was it the same kind of moral reasoning that led Sammy to quit his job at the A & P when he felt

that the bikini girls were not treated fairly? Didion writes that, "we stay with the body or have

bad dreams" if we had a moral upbringing, because if the body is left alone, it will suffer

indignities beyond what even a corpse should have to experience, like being ripped to shreds by

coyotes and enjoyed as a lunchtime snack by the maggots of blow flies (Didion, 1965). So does

morality guide our conduct starting at a young age, giving us such a strong sense of the correct

behavior even in a new circumstance that we instinctively seem to know what to do? Or is our

behavior just as likely to be influenced by the fear of what others might think about us if we

leave a corpse by itself?

Sammy cared about what others thought about him. He wanted to impress the bikini girls

by his actions when his quit his job at the A & P; this was clear when he went out onto the hot

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asphalt of the parking lot and said to himself, “I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of

course” (Updike, 2004). Once he realized his moral outrage was not going to be appreciated by

anyone but himself, he started to regret what he had done and recognized how “hard the world

was going to be” now that his grand cause has disappeared along with the bikini girls. Like the

man who babysat the corpse through a long, dark night rather than try to talk sense into his wife

about how dangerous that could be, Sammy now faced many nights and days hovering over the

corpse of his now-emaciated Ghandi-esque spectacle. He would not suffer too long, however, as

Sammy was only nineteen and had the short memory and massive pride of youth. This memory

of Sammy’s last stand at the checkout line would fade and become less harsh over time.

It is interesting that Wallace also brings up behavior in a checkout line in his

commencement address at Kenyon College (2005), stating that “you can choose to look

differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout

line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the

hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer.” Wallace illustrates morally correct behavior in

the examples he uses in this speech rather than just lecturing about it, and he does this very well

with examples that are easy to understand like the checkout line woman. He suggests that the

graduates should “stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant

monologue inside your own head” (Wallace, 2005). Each of us naturally finds ourselves at the

center of a universe that starts out very small in our childhood before expanding rapidly as we

approach adulthood. The rapidly expanding world we find ourselves in has lots of rules with no

well-written playbook, and our frustrations as well as excitement at the myriad opportunities just

beyond our reach can lead us to behave badly on occasion.

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To keep your behavior more moral, more kind, Wallace says that you need to keep the

truth at the surface of your conscience at all times. The truth being, that worship of false idols is

bound to end badly. Wallace could have been speaking specifically about Sammy when he said

“Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on

the verge of being found out” (Wallace, 2005). Sammy was very clever, as he exhibited with his

musings on A & P customers. He also had a clever idea about how to try and impress the bikini

girls when he decided to quit, but as Wallace predicted, Sammy ended up feeling very stupid and

probably like a fraud, a result of his reliance upon his intellect to guide him. If Sammy had heard

Wallace’s speech before that fateful day in the grocery store, he may very well have thought

more about how his actions would affect others like his parents and Mr. Lengler. As a nineteen

year-old, Sammy’s idea of freedom was being able to quit a job on a whim. Wallace describes

true freedom in a very different way: “freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline,

and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad

petty, unsexy ways every day” (Wallace, 2005). With age comes wisdom, and Sammy as an

adult would possibly even be able to laugh at his actions that day, and how his hormones

controlled his mind for those brief minutes. And he most likely would realize the fallacy in using

any form of the term “moral” in the reasons behind his actions and be a better person because of

that silly mistake he made at the A & P that summer.

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Works Cited

Updike, John. "A & P." (2004). Web. 7 April 2014. <http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-

2004/A&P.pdf>

Wallace, David Foster. "Kenyon College Commencement Speech". Kenyon College. 21 May

2005. Commencement Address. Web. 2 April 2014. < http://philosopher-at-

large.blogspot.com/2014/04/this-is-water-david-foster-wallace.html>

Didion, Joan. "On Morality" (Originally titled "The Insidious Ethic of Conscience"). The

American Scholar. 1965. Web. 6 April 2014.< http://jso290.wordpress.com/2012/

01/14/onmorality/>