"The Magic Eye"
...dividuals. Can three things (money, power, respect) fire one¡¯s imagination to sacrifice a job? What may be one¡¯s definition of a hero? According to the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary a: ¡°Hero¡± is a man, now also a woman, distinguished by the performance of extraordinary brave or noble deeds. Going with Oxford¡¯s definition of a ¡°hero¡±, can one say Sammy is a hero? Sammy¡¯s main motive to quit his job is to go from lemonade ¡°. . . in tall glasses with ¡®They¡¯ll do it every time¡¯ cartoons stenciled on¡±(15) to ¡°. . . drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them¡±(15). Thus wise, is Sammy a hero if he sacrifices his job for himself rather than for Queenie and the girls? ¡°I look around for my girls, but they¡¯re gone . . . ¡°(16). Addition to his selfishness, Sammy assumes the girls look upon him as their savior. The principle characters in the short story ¡°A & P¡± are Sammy, Lengel, and three unnamed teenage girls. Most people see the above sentence as a misanthropic sentence. In this story, most readers may assume the girls are not described as normal teenage girls in the 1950¡¯s, but, instead, they are actually described as so-called ¡°easy to get in their pants¡± high school drop outs ¡°, . . . [Queenie] lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top¡±(15). The way the author describes the girls have nothing to do with their intelligence but instead their appearance. For instance, ¡°[The Queen] had on a kind of dirty-pink--beige . . . bathing suit with a little nubble all over it . . . the straps were down¡±(13). After reading ¡°A & P¡± a number of times, I came to an understanding that the author is not meaning to have Queenie and the girls appear as ¡°easy¡± high school drop outs. I looked beyond everything else and realized Queenie and the girls are rebelling agains...