Does Lust Lead to Hardship and Emptiness? In this article (do you mean "this article" or "John Updike's 'A&P'?") Sammy has a sexual appetite that is causing him problems. His worship of a woman's body (paying attention to the placement of the possessive apostrophe) leads him to misplace his values. and focus only on one value. This value is the lustful pleasure he feels when he sees three girls in their skimpy swimsuits. The pleasure he receives outweighs the consequence of the emptiness he ultimately feels after defending these girls and them not responding to his pleasure. feelings. Updike in his short story "A&P" uses characterization to illustrate that heroism based on animal sexual appetite, which objectifies women, will lead to a difficult and unsuccessful life. Updike uses Sammy's characterization to illustrate that animal sexual appetite objectifies women. Sammy describes Queenie in a sexual way when describing (try to avoid using the same word twice in a single sentence; try a synonym - to find synonyms, there's a cool thesaurus website from Merrium Webster at www.mw.com; also note that you have moved from the present to the past here; when writing about art, you normally stay in the present tense throughout Queenie's body and swimsuit. missing proper punctuation after say; if you kept your Holt manual, you should be able to look up the punctuation with quotes) "With the straps pushed back, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of his head, except just her, that bare, clean shot from the top of her chest to her shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted into the light" (13). (Remember, MLA style requires you to put the page number of each quote in parentheses immediately after each quote) Sammy describes this as more than pretty. His sexual appetite pushes him to view these three girls not as people but as objects. Sammy sees these women as icons to be coveted, just like in an Eastern Orthodox church where they have icons of Jesus and Mary that you can focus on and worship. Sammy in fact uses these women as objects of lust and thus worships human sexuality. He sees these women as objects of pleasure, thus feeding his animal sexual appetite. (I have some comments on the previous passage - which I colored blue.