Compare and contrast a well lighted room and A & P Essay

Compare and contrast a well lighted room and A & P - Essay Example When his boss embarrasses the girls by telling them they can’t come in to the store dressed that way, the narrator quits his job in protest, even though the girls don’t see or hear what he has done. In â€Å"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,† two waiters are closing up a restaurant and talking about the old man who is their last customer. The young waiter is unkind to the old man, but the older waiter thinks he understands how the old man feels. After the young waiter gets the old man to leave, the older waiter thinks about a prayer where all of the important words are replaced by â€Å"nada,† Spanish for â€Å"nothing,† then goes to a bar. The two stories have two very different narration styles. In â€Å"A & P,† the narration is first-person, and is from the point of view of the nineteen-year-old clerk. It is in the language and tone that he thinks in, and it is clear and tells a distinct story. The audience sees his view of the customers, for e xample when he makes a mistake at the register: â€Å"She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up† (Updike). The story is as the narrator imagines it, which the reader can imagine might not be the way things really happened.