Robert Coover reviewed this work in August 29, 1993 in the New York Times Book Review, "Hyperfiction; And Now, Boot Up the Reviews" This is a highly discussed work of electronic literature since it was one of the first electronic interactive novels, therefore many articles have been written about it.
Espen J. Aarseth devotes a chapter of his book
Cybertext to
afternoon, arguing that it is a classic example of
modernist literature. It is however often thought of as a work of
postmodern literature, as evidenced by its inclusion in the
Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction. Chapters of
Jay David Bolter's
Writing Space and
J. Yellowlees Douglas's
The End of Books or Books Without End also discuss
afternoon, as does Matthew G. Kirschenbaum's
Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. A number of scholars have discussed the extent to which
afternoon extends or breaks with conventional definitions of narrative. Early scholarship used and adapted the theory of
narratology to understand
afternoon. One of the first examples is Gunnar Liestøl's article "Wittgenstein, Genette, and the Reader's Narrative in Hypertext" in
George Landow's
Hyper/Text/Theory (1994).
Jill Walker's 1998 analysis explores "ways in which the text confuses the reader but also the many stabilising elements that aid the reader to piece together a story". Rasmus Blok discusses "the sense of narrative" in
afternoon. This work was analyzed in
Astrid Ensslin's work,
Pre-web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature (2022). == Translations and editions ==