25 pages • 50 minutes read
Naguib MahfouzHalf a Day
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Shortness of Human Life and the Subjectivity of Time
The title of Mahfouz’s story provides an important clue to the work’s central theme. Ostensibly a reference to the amount of time that passes over the course of the story, “half a day” is in fact a statement about the relative shortness of human life; as Mahfouz depicts it, the period from birth to death isn’t even comparable to a full 24 hours, but only to a school day.
This shortness, however, is as much a matter of perception as it is of reality. A human lifespan may indeed be brief in the grand scheme of things, but “Half a Day” implies that it seems briefer still because of the way in which many of us live our lives. Using the school the boy attends as a symbol for life itself, Mahfouz suggests that humans tend to lead an unreflective existence, too preoccupied by the mundane concerns of daily life to appreciate the passage of time: “Dust-laden winds and unexpected accidents came about suddenly, so we had to be watchful, at the ready, and very patient” (Paragraph 14). In many ways, Mahfouz associates this tendency to let life slip by with the nature of modern society, which requires us to spend much of our time at work or contending with other burdensome institutions; the narrator, for instance, initially describes school as a kind of prison and reacts skeptically to his father’s claim that he should want to go to school to become a “useful” member of society.
Nevertheless, in highlighting the way the narrator’s life passes before he himself realizes it, “Half a Day” is also making a broader point about human psychology. Although time’s passage has obvious real-world effects—for instance, the changes that have taken place in the city while the narrator was at school—the way in which humans experience time is highly subjective. In other words, while certain experiences may pass more quickly than we realize, others seem to take longer than they in fact do or loom so large in memory that they seem to occupy a more significant portion of our lives than they actually did.
“Half a Day” illustrates this subjectivity by recounting the narrator’s story from his own point of view, which has the effect of muddying the work’s “real” timescale. For instance, while it’s easy to assume that the majority of the narrator’s life passes while he’s attending classes, his interaction with the middle-aged man suggests that he, too, may be middle-aged at the time the school day ends. This would imply that the next several decades of his life pass in the even briefer window of time that elapses as he’s walking home. Further complicating matters is the fact that this walk home occupies roughly as much narrative space as the school day itself; from the narrator’s perspective, then, these two periods of time may feel equal in length regardless of whether they actually are.
The Transformation of Egyptian Society During the 20th Century
The narrator’s aging has an external counterpart in the changes that take place in his home city while he’s at school. As a boy, the narrator lives on a peaceful street surrounded by gardens and open fields; by the time he’s an old man, the population of the city has boomed, and its character has changed as it has modernized and adopted the hallmarks of contemporary urban centers (cars, skyscrapers, etc.).
These changes parallel those that took place in Egyptian society, government, culture, and economy over the course of Mahfouz’s own life. At the time of Mahfouz’s birth (1911), Egypt was still theoretically a tributary state of the Ottoman Empire; within a few years, it would become part of the British Empire, and then attain nominal independence in 1922. Nevertheless, the British remained a presence in the country until the overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy, at which point the country entered a period of socialist reform and political repression under President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser was succeeded by President Anwar Sadat, who reversed some of Nasser’s policies while sharing his authoritarian tendencies.
Mahfouz’s attitude toward this changing political landscape was ambivalent. Although supportive of both Egyptian independence and socialism, he disapproved of Nasser’s crackdown on political opposition. Mahfouz was also skeptical of some of the changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization, which accelerated under Sadat. These political concerns are at the heart of much of Mahfouz’s writing, “Half a Day” included; as the narrator emerges from school, he encounters evidence of military rule (“trucks carrying central security troops”), overcrowding (“hordes of humanity”), and pollution (“hills of refuse”; Paragraph 19). There are also indications that these changes have altered the basic character of the city and perhaps even contributed to an unraveling of its social fabric. Like many writers concerned with the impact of urbanization, Mahfouz implies that the size and anonymity of modern cities fosters apathy toward one’s fellow human beings: “A battle raged between a taxi driver and his passenger, while the passenger’s wife called out for help and no one answered” (Paragraph 19).
Mahfouz’s depiction of urban alienation makes it all the more notable that the story ends with a gesture of help, as a boy “gallantly” offers to help the narrator cross a busy street. For all his criticisms of modern Egyptian society, Mahfouz didn’t believe that resistance to any and all change was the solution. By casting the younger generation in this sympathetic light, Mahfouz is perhaps hinting that some kind of balance can be achieved between new ways of living and traditional social bonds.
Humanity’s Relationship to God
Mahfouz grew up in a devoutly Muslim household, and allusions to Islam and the Qur’an feature prominently in his writing. In “Half a Day,” for instance, religious instruction constitutes an important part of the narrator’s education, and the aspect of this study that Mahfouz focuses on is significant: “The story of the Creator of the universe was read to us, we were told of His present world and of His Hereafter” (Paragraph 13). This reference to Islamic cosmology hints at another way of interpreting Mahfouz’s story: as an allegory of human history and destiny within the context of Islam.
The Islamic creation story begins with the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise, which the Qur’an depicts as a garden. It’s therefore noteworthy that the narrator describes his childhood home as situated on a street “lined with gardens” (Paragraph 2), and that he feels he’s being “throw[n]” out of this world and into the world of school. His father’s response to this concern is also telling: He assures his son that school isn’t a punishment, echoing Islam’s framing of humanity’s descent to earth as a necessary step in its spiritual development. The narrator’s account of life at school continues to mirror the Islamic understanding of existence in the world as we know it, which, though not as “sweet and unclouded” as life in paradise (Paragraph 14), is nevertheless not an unmitigated evil: “Those who were able took advantage of the opportunities for success and happiness that presented themselves amid the worries” (Paragraph 15).
However, there’s at least one way in which the cosmology of “Half a Day” differs significantly from Islamic teachings: God (here represented by the boy’s father) disappears completely after the narrator leaves paradise for the real world. What’s more, the father breaks his promise to meet his son at the end of the day—figuratively, the end of the narrator’s life, at which point Islam teaches he might reasonably expect to be reunited with God in paradise. It was this kind of heterodoxy that led Islamist extremists to attempt to assassinate Mahfouz in 1994; however, the absence of “God” in “Half a Day” is likely less a commentary on God than on humanity, which Mahfouz often depicted as spiritually adrift in modern society.
The fact that the work’s religious imagery resurfaces in the final paragraph of the story lends further credence to this idea. The societal unraveling Mahfouz depicts coincides with apocalyptic imagery reminiscent of the way in which several religions describe the end of the world; in particular, the “blazing fire” the narrator describes recalls the fire that, according to Islamic hadith, will drive all people to the place where God will judge them. In other words, God is still present in the world Mahfouz describes, even if humanity fails to recognize this.
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