All stories have a unique or hidden way of displaying a message in a reader’s mind, and not every message is the same. However, if you look hard enough at any story, anyone can find a common theme between any stories. In “A&P”, “Rites of Passage”, and “The only girl at the boy’s party” we discussed the themes “Hero” and “Sheep” and broke them down a bit. But as I thought about these stories I found my own sort of them that I could place as a common theme between these stories. The theme that I came up with is…. “Growing Up”. I chose growing up because in each story, I realized that the characters were getting older or being pictured as getting old in some sense or another.
In “A&P”, Sammy, the main character is a cashier and while at work one day he sees three girls in bathing suits walking around in the store. Later in the story, his manager tells the girls to leave because he does not like the way they are dressed while they’re walking in his store and he does not think it is appropriate. After Sammy see’s this, he decides to impress the girls by quitting his job but they do not see him do it and his plan backfires. So after reading this, why do I think that this story has something to do with growing up? Well while he is outside he realizes and says to himself “…and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” This is the feeling everyone gets when the realize that they are in a whole new chapter of their life, and that is time to put down all their childish things are really start trying to work towards something. That’s when you realize that you have to start being more of any adult, like when you first enter into college by yourself. I guess you can call it ‘that grown up feeling’.
“The only girl at the boy’s party” is about a girl at an all boys’ party but when you’re reading it you can’t tell how old she is. When you first start reading it, the girl seems to be young like around 3 or 4 maybe except as the story goes on you realize that the narrator or the girl’s mom or dad starts to describe the girls’ experience in a more PG-13 sort of way. This is likewise in "Rites of Passage" where the story starts off about a little boy at a party but evolves into a story more about a group of young men or soldiers and the narrator keeps depicting.