Essay Questions

What clues in the narrator’s accounts in “The Lawsuit” indicate that his anger toward his father’s second wife is perhaps misdirected?

Ostensibly, the narrator is upset with his father for leaving his mother to marry another woman and, in the process, robbing him and the rest of the family of their rightful inheritance. And, indeed, there is little doubt that this anger is genuine. But along the way, a certain recurrence of a theme beings to build which is highly suggestive of something more psychologically complex and less directly mercenary. By the third paragraph (noting that the second is just one sentence) he is already beginning to let the truth slip through the cracks: “Today, like me, she was in her forties. Has her beauty withstood the passage of time?” And, so, it is not just that his wife abandoned the family for another woman, but a beautiful younger woman no older than his eldest son. The narrator continues from that point onward to make constant references to the second wife’s physical attractiveness until the story concludes with exclamation point when he sees what has become of her since last they met: “She was fat, excessively and unacceptably so.” It is only upon seeing that she is no longer desirable that he “felt an inner peace.”

What is the “mysterious darkness” about to descend which terrifies the young narrator as the ‘‘The Conjurer Made Off with the Dish” draws to close?

The young boy narrating this story endures a kind of “Groundhog Day” experience in which he forced to return back home several times and then head back into the horrors of the city as he attempts to fulfill his seemingly simple task of buy beans. Along the way he encounters a magician who steals one of the dishes, his first romantic encounter with a girl, the necessity for another return home in order to use his own savings to make up for the second payment he wasted on a show. In addition to beans being stolen, he is also thwarted by the bean merchant being sold out. It is just one experience after another that culminates with getting lost in a part of the city in which he witnesses a man strangling a woman. As he sits there unsure of what to do, he urges himself to be resolute and just make a decision one way or the other before the “mysterious darkness would descend.” The phrase is intended literally, of course, as the long day is about to turn to night, but the story has by then become an allegory of growing up and facing the world as an adult where every choice has a consequence and every consequence offers either reward or punishment.

What is highly unusual about the way “By a Person Unknown” ends?

The story is unusual in the first place for Mahfouz is that it is constructed as a fairly straightforward police procedural following a police officer’s investigation into the work of a sophisticated serial killer easily eluding law enforcement. Although not a first-person account, the story is seen through the eyes of just one officer and the narrative features crime scene descriptions offering clues to the killer’s modus operandi, but not much insight into his character. The title and the assertion at the end of the second paragraph, in fact, indicate that psychological insight is not uppermost in the author’s mind: “What a man! What nerves!...What a murderer!” Descriptions of the crimes, sparely little witness interrogation dialogue and a distinct focus on the state of the mind of the cop thwarted at every turn conspire to make this one of those very rare serial killer stories that is not really about the killer. Even more so, it joins such masterpieces of the genre as the Korean film Memories of Murder among that very limited group of serial killer fiction in which the killer is neither caught nor identified.