Half a Day

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1991

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Literary Devices

Allegory

Allegory is a genre of writing in which the narrative as a whole symbolizes an otherwise unstated moral or concept. Although allegory is typically coherent when read at face value, most if not all of its characters and events are stand-ins for figures and ideas that, when taken together, also constitute a cohesive narrative. In many cases, allegory is a means for an author to make a complex philosophical or religious point more accessible.

“Half a Day” is a strongly allegorical work in the sense that nearly every element within it is symbolic. Somewhat unusually, however, these correspondences aren’t one-to-one: “Half a Day” can be read as an allegory for several distinct ideas, including the brevity of human life, the relationship of humanity to God, and the social and economic changes Egypt experienced over the course of the 20th century. In other words, while a given element of the story might be more significant in one interpretation than in another, all are nevertheless compatible with multiple different readings. The gardens near the narrator’s childhood home are a good example of this; although first and foremost a symbol of paradise in the religious sense, they also evoke the idyllic state of early childhood, as well as Egypt’s preindustrial past.

Surrealism

As its name suggests, surrealism is in some sense the opposite of realism; rather than seeking to depict the world as it actually is or appears, surrealist literature employs deliberately strange, illogical, and disjointed imagery. In many cases, the dreamlike nature of surrealism appeals to the reader’s unconscious impulses and feelings—that is, it captures a kind of psychological truth rather than objective truth.

With this approach to truth in mind, the influence of surrealism on “Half a Day” becomes clear; strictly speaking, the events of the story are impossible, but the compression of the narrator’s life into a single day at school does ring psychologically true as a depiction of how humans experience time’s passage. Mahfouz also uses surrealist imagery in the story’s final paragraph as a way of evoking the chaos, upheaval, and supernatural events that many religions associate with the apocalypse: “High buildings had taken over, the street surged with children, and disturbing noises shook the air. At various points stood conjurers showing off their tricks and making snakes appear from baskets” (Paragraph 19).

Pacing

Pacing—that is, the rate at which a story unfolds—is an element of all narrative, but it has special significance in “Half a Day” because of the story’s own interest in time. Writers routinely use pacing to maintain and direct the reader’s attention, spending more narrative time on pivotal events while skimming over large periods when nothing significant occurs. By employing this strategy, however, Mahfouz isn’t simply directing our focus, but also commenting on the way we as humans experience time; in much the same way that an author can compress a long period of time into a short passage, we often perceive time as passing either more slowly or more quickly than it actually is. “Half a Day” illustrates this tendency by repeatedly contrasting narrative time with “real” time; the boy, for instance, spends the vast majority of the half-day the story covers at school, but his time at school occupies only about a third of the narrative itself, underscoring time’s tendency to slip by unnoticed while we’re preoccupied with other things.

Point of View

Point of view is the perspective from which an author narrates a story—typically either third person (“he,” “she,” “they”) or first person (“I”). Mahfouz’s decision to use the first person in “Half a Day” is significant for a couple of reasons. First, the story’s first-person narration is inseparable from its interest not just in the passage of time, but also in the way a given individual perceives that passage; by telling the story from the narrator’s perspective, Mahfouz allows the reader to share in this subjective experience. In addition, the use of first person allows Mahfouz to foreshadow the amount of time that has truly passed, since the narrator’s syntax and vocabulary are from the beginning more typical of an adult than a child.