"Half a Day" and Other Short Stories Literary Elements

Short Stories/Egyptian Fiction/World Literature

Mahfouz is a distinctly Egyptian writer and almost every one of his works of short fiction is set in the city of Cairo. But it is Cairo that exists both within starkly realistic terms and a more metaphorical and symbolic plane.

The typical short story by this author is a first-person account in which everything is perceived through the singular perspective of what it typically a male outsider point-of-view.

The tone and mood of the bulk of the author’s short stories is bleakly pessimistic view that does occasionally veer into outright nihilism.

Protagonist: usually just an average person who finds himself in a world where contentment seems impossible. Antagonist: the antagonist of these stories often just the advancement of age but is also just as likely to be the mystery of random acts of fate.

“By a Person Unknown” presents the major conflict of Mahfouz’s short stories as a collective body of work in miniature. The conflict at first seems to be between a serial killer and the detective who is persistently thwarted in his investigation. By the end of the story, the killer is intimated to be much more metaphorical and unstoppable: death itself.

The climax of “At the Bus Stop” is another example of how an element in one single story can be extrapolated to cover the basis narrative concept of a body of work. This is a story in which a series of increasingly violent behavior around the title location is relentlessly ignored by the only nearby policeman. The story climaxes in the final paragraph when the cop finally becomes proactive and opens fire on all the witnesses surrounding him begging for an explanation of his choice to ignore the terror.

An assertion made early in the story “The Norwegian Rat” foreshadows the unexpectedly strange climax: “Whatever a rat’s identity, it’s still harmful.”

The highly symbolic narrative of “Half a Day” concludes on a note of understated tragedy: “He stretched out his arm and said gallantly, `Grandpa, let me take you across.’”

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Imagery is used in the climax of “The Lawsuit” to describe the woman who has made the titular legal action and it this unexpected depiction which jars the reader as well shocking the narrator to adopt a new perspective: “She was fat, excessively and unacceptably so, and the charming freshness had leaked away from her face. What little beauty was left seemed insipid. A veneer of perpetual dejection acted like a screen between her and other people.”

“Half a Day” is constructed upon the paradox of the time period expressed in the title being long enough to convey a story about a character from childhood to senior citizenship.

“The Norwegian Rat” is a story about a bureaucratic property inspector coming to inspect a building in which the tenants have complained of being overrun by rats. The whole story leads to the climactic scene in which the rats and the bureaucrat are paralleled as identical species of vermin: “I became aware of a dramatic change in his appearance. It seemed that his face reminded me no longer of a cat but of a rat, in fact of the Norwegian rat itself.”

A commonly used example of metonymy is used which substitutes the actual mechanical means of printing newspaper to cover the full range of journalism: “The fact is that news disappears from the world once it disappears from the press.”

A triple play of personification in just one sentence: “The inclining sun cast scorching rays on the embroidered scarves, and a khamsin wind blew like a thing possessed, burning the men’s faces and stirring up a loathsome gloom in the air.”