Half a Day

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.