"Samuel" Summary Of A Short Story Written By Grace Paley
Samuel
"Samuel", written by Grace Paley, is a short story about four boys playing on a train one afternoon in the Bronx, New York. These four boys, Samuel, Tom, Alfred, and Calvin, were young and playful just as most boys are when they are young. They were daring, brave and curious. One character, Samuel, really caught my attention. He seemed the most curious, and the most joyous of the four. He seemed like the main character that you knew something unexpected would happen to, either good or bad.
When the four boys were jiggling and swaying on the platform of the train between cars, they made all the adults nervous. The men were reminded of times when they were once young, brave, and carefree. They thought about silly events that trouble that they had caused doing similar things and how much fun they had. The women all wanted to tell them to stop, but they were afraid that the boys would come back with rude remarks that would embarrass them. I guess it was their motherly instinct. The boys continued to play and imagine that they were rockets blasting off deep into space, and they tapped the glass loudly acting like they were shooting machine guns. Yes, these boys, especially Samuel, were the attention and distraction between these two cars on the train. One lady warned them that they would be hurt or even killed if they kept fooling around. They laughed at her, but she was thinking of her little boy at home and knew how upset their mothers would be if they knew what they were doing.
The boys kept laughing and Samuel seemed to instigate the laughing the most as he pounded his friend, Alfred on the back. Tears came to Alfred's eyes and Samuel only bullied him. Samuel called him a crybaby and asked him why he was crying, as if to humiliate or embarrass him. I felt that they were just playing around with each other like normal boys and that Samuel was no bully. One of the men that had been watching must have been a child who was...
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