English Language and Literature Blog

Quote: "That was how your own parents were buried: your father, Amm Mahran, the kindly concierge of the student’s hostel, who died middle-aged after a hard but honest and satisfying life. You helped him in his work from your childhood on. For all the extreme simplicity, even poverty of their lives, the family enjoyed sitting together when the day’s work was done, in their ground-floor room at the entrance to the building, where Amm Mahran and his wife would chat together while their child played. His piety made him happy, and the students respected him. The only entertainment he knew was making pilgrimage to the home of Sheikh Ali al-Junaydi, and it was through your father that you came to know the house. “Come along,” he’d say, “and I’ll show you how to have more fun than playing in the fields. You’ll see how sweet life can be, what it’s like in an atmosphere of godliness." Passage Analysis - Page 101: In chapter eleven, the reader begins to see a lot of chara...

Stream of consciousness is a device that acts as a mode of narration. The stream of consciousness aims to reproduce the continuous flow of a single character’s mental thoughts and processes. This is where sense perception fuses with memories, expectations, conscious thoughts and feelings. This style of writing is used throughout the thief and the dogs originally written by Naguib Mahfouz. The Thief and the Dogs was initially written in Arabic and was the start of this style of writing within the Arabic culture, which is seen in the interior monologue of Said Mahran, when we see his thoughts and emotions take over for a small period of time. This is seen at the start of the story when Said displays his internal thoughts regarding a few past events in his life. Another case where we can see Said looks back on how he feels betrayed by his past mentor Rauf Ilish, his past friend who married his wife Ilish Sidra, and finally his ex-wife Nabawiyya. as Said reflects on his emotions, he i...