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.
Symbols & Motifs
The School
The school where the boy spends “half a day” is a symbol of human life. In fact, multiple characters equate the two explicitly: The boy’s father tells him that in going to school, he “truly begin[s] life” (Paragraph 7), and the lady the boy meets there advises the students, “Dry your tears and face life joyfully” (Paragraph 12). As the day progresses, the parallels between school and life become even clearer, with the students experiencing their “first introduction to language” (Paragraph 13), developing friendships and romantic attachments, and contending with “unexpected accidents.” The boy’s descriptions of school at last become so abstract that they read more as musings on the nature of life than as a literal account of his day: “As our path revealed itself to us, […] we did not find it as totally sweet and unclouded as we had presumed” (Paragraph 13).
These specific parallels aside, it’s worth considering why Mahfouz chooses school for the setting of an allegorical account of human life. The most obvious explanation is that life itself is often described as a process of learning and growth; those with religious or spiritual leanings might further add that life’s ultimate purpose is to prepare us for the afterlife (or some other new form of existence), in much the same way that school prepares children for adult life. However, this explanation doesn’t account for the negative tone the narrator often uses to describe school—for instance, his comparison of the building to a “huge, high-walled fortress” (Paragraph 5), or his later remark that the students aren’t free to leave. The implication is that life isn’t a matter of choice; just as students proceed through successive grades, we inevitably proceed through the different stages of life (childhood, adulthood, old age, and death). In addition, the routines that preoccupy the students while at school evoke the day-to-day obligations (e.g., work) that consume so much of our lives whether we want them to or not.
The Gardens
The gardens that surround the narrator’s childhood home, and that disappear by the time he’s an old man, have both religious and social significance. Like other Abrahamic religions, Islam teaches that Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise (described in the Qur’an as “the Garden”) after eating forbidden fruit. The reference to gardens therefore underscores the association between the home the narrator leaves to attend school and the paradise humanity left to exist in the world as we know it. The gardens’ disappearance also symbolizes the industrialization and urbanization that Egypt (and especially Cairo) underwent in the second half of the 20th century, as “extensive fields planted with crops” increasingly gave way to “high buildings” and “hills of refuse” (Paragraphs 2, 19).
The Tarboosh
The tarboosh the boy wears on his first day at school provides a clue to the story’s setting. This style of hat (also known as a fez) was introduced to Egypt while the country was under Ottoman rule and was closely associated with both Turkey and Islam. Due to these imperialist and religious connotations, President Nasser banned the tarboosh in 1958 as part of his push toward modernization. By including this detail about the boy’s clothing, Mahfouz underscores the story’s relationship to Egypt’s transformation over the course of the 20th century; the narrative begins prior to the overthrow of the monarchy (and perhaps even prior to Egyptian independence) and ends well afterward.
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