It can function literally [or] it can be the symbolic door between husband and wife, between old friends, or between chance acquaintances…The image of the door, a familiar object of everyday life, is fitting and effective for Updike’s purpose: to show that the formative events of one’s life occur within the framework of the common, [and] can be redeemed or lost through the quality of one’s response to them.” - Literary critic Richard Detweiler in John Updike (1984).

The style catches only the outside of things, the shell of the corporate experience we all have being twentieth-century Americans…The inside, the characters’ capacity to connect feeling and form, is missing.

[8][9] The stories that comprise the volume were written over a period of five years, composed between November 1955 to April 1957, and possess some degree of consistency in their style and structure.

Indeed, half of the stories, which are set in Manhattan, are “remarkably homogeneous.”[10][11] Professor Richard H. Rupp writes: “The most obvious characteristic of Updike’s style is his exhaustive exploration of minute physical detail.

Even in his first collection, The Same Door, the scene is microscopic.”[12] Literary critic Robert Detweiler locates the central thematic element of the stories in “the unexpected gifts of personal encounter”, and quotes Updike's remark regarding the Olinger Stories: “The point, to me, is plain…We are all rewarded unexpectedly.”[13] Detwieler acknowledges Updike's debt to James Joyce: The particular unifying technique is similar to the Joycean epiphany...The Same Door stories, instead of attempting the brutal shock or the psychological shock, concentrate on producing the gradual revelation - the culminating knowledge-plus-emotion that dawns upon the protagonist following his crucial experience…[which] forces the character and reader to pause and then reconsider the entire composition.