An Unexpected Afternoon Samir Toma

Samir Toma’s “An Unexpected Afternoon” ties together the feelings of confusion, fear, and innocence into one short story with a large impact. The author used the elements of good writing consistently throughout the story.
The writing is free of redundancies and straight to the point. This greatly helps the reader clearly understand what is being said and done, along with its significance. The details are creatively used throughout the story to manipulate the reader’s mind into feeling a certain way about a person or action. Using an example to illustrate this, the author states, “An Iraqi army general, wearing a black beret and a side arm pistol, stomps onto the playground”. From this sentence, it can be determined that this man is scary as he’s …show more content…
Toma doesn’t directly state that this man is frightening to the children, but Toma’s voice in the story seamlessly illustrates that to the readers. Similar details are consistently used throughout the story. The emotion of fear is established when the character describes his friend “standing up on trembling legs”. The use of the word “trembling” displays a fear of the army general. Furthermore, the sentence, “I look at my clothes and realize that I’m not the one wearing the grey shirt” illustrates the sense of relief and fear for his friend that he must have felt when the army general had called on them. The innocence of the children is portrayed through the use of simple sentences. These sentences are slightly child-like, which allows the audience to step into Toma’s perspective as a child. A statement that supports this would be, “I do not know why he tells all this information to elementary school children”, as if to say that the children are confused morally and believe