Although Afternoon, A Story by Michael Joyce was hardly visually stimulating I did find it an interesting read. When I first went through the hypertext I started by clicking on random words to see where they would lead me to. In the beginning I did manage to hit a few words that led me to a successive number of coherent pages but this was quick to diminish. I gathered from this random clicking of words that there were several characters that were somehow intertwined. With this in mind I took a moment to take each page as it was and not be bothered with the story as a whole quite yet. I found the language of Afternoon very poetic and stimulating, the word choice spoke to me in a way that many of our previous hypertexts have not. I found the writing itself rather beautiful.
I eventually got sick of the randomness of my technique and began clicking “yes” after I finished reading each page. Here I began to get a clearer idea of the story unfolding. From my random word selection technique I gathered that there was a couple very unhappy, most specifically a man. His woman counterpart was stale in feelings about the status of their relationship. I gathered that she transfered herself between the relationship with this one man, and being the “whore” to another. As I began clicking the “yes” button the story further unfolded and I grew to understand that they perhaps had a kid together, Andy, and that somehow this family was intertwined with a car accident. As the father tries to get in touch with his child’s mother the story begins to loop around to the same several pages when the “yes” button is clicked. I than began to click upon words again and pages that previously made little sense to me began to become clearer with a basis to the story underway.
Although the story was confusing and I never really did get any sense of closure. I don’t think it would be true to the text if there was a sense of closure. I believe the whole thing was meant to leave the reader a little restless, sometimes that seems to resonate more than a happy ending.