Alienation and LonelinessThe 1984 Novel by George Orwell

George Orwells 1984, uses betrayal as a method to further the feeling of alienation and loneliness. â€Å"In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits (Updike 430).† The opening of the short story written by John Updike, called ‘AP’, immediately creates a sense of bewilderment. The setting the author uses as the backdrop is very essential to the story and helps with understanding the main character’s decision to eventually quit his job at the end. The protagonist and main character is Sammy, an employee of the AP. Sammy not only walks away from his job, but he also chooses to leave the AP and what the store represents in the story. John Updike’s ‘AP’ uses the setting of the story to create a feeling of being restricted.†¦show more content†¦At one point he even describes a few shoppers as â€Å"houseslaves in pin curlers† (Updike 432). The local regular shoppers seem to walk around the store as if in a coma or trance, because the rigidness provided in the setting. The store is located directly in the middle of the town only five miles away from the beach. Despite the close proximity to the beach, Sammy describes some of the people in the town by saying they probably have not even seen the ocean in many years (Updike 432). This observation is important to the story, because three girls walk into the store in nothing but their bathing suits. This in turn causes a problem. The issue was not that the girls were wearing bathing suits; it had more to do with wearing the bathing suits in a place where people do not normally wear them, inside the AP. You know, it’s one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the AP, under the florescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor. (Updike 432) This example is a reflection of the ideologies of that time period. The girls were doing something that was not socially acceptable, especially in the setting of a small town grocery store, like the AP. As soon as the manager, who was described by Sammy as a dreary Sunday school teacher, saw the