Naguib Mahfouz's Half A Day

Although he was very thankful for her kindness, he could not thank her, for he knew he was going to have to drop out again to help out at home. At the age of sixteen, Myers had dropped out of school again and joined a gang. He got into all kinds of trouble, and although he didn’t like it, he continued to do bad things until his parents sent him off into the army at the age of seventeen. The army, his awful home life, tons of research, and his love for writing literature inspired him to write this novel. Sunrise Over Fallujah contains many exciting elements and draws the reader in, however it can be found boring at some times.

Most people live a relatively normal day to day life even if we may have our share of mundane problems. If we are asked to describe our emotions, at the very least we can say happy or sad or fine. When we truly love something or take great pleasure in something, most of us tend to wax poetically. In contrast, there are people like Ishmael Beah whose lives started off quite normal but then it took a major wrong turn. From the tender age of ten years, Beah witnessed the horrors of war in his home country, Sierra Leone.

The book Hatchet was full of adventure around every corner. There is not a moment in the entire book where you’re not held in suspense or on the edge of your seat wonder what might happen to Brian, the main character. It is a book about both a self conflict, and a battle against nature for the survival of the fittest. This story starts off holding you in suspense, Brian is a city boy that is going through a hard time because he knows “The Secret” that his dad doesn’t know, so it’s causing a divorce. Now you want to know what the secret is and how it managed to cause an entire divorce.

There were rats and garbage in apartments and each apartment housed an entire family. Sewage and garbage accumulated so much because there was no plumbing, so waste was dumped into streets and rivers. “The slums . . . [have] streets [that] are usually unpaved, full of holes, filthy and strewn with refuse . .

The author uses a lot of imagery, symbol, and builds a connection with the readers. In the country Sierra Leone, a war broke out in 1993 where the rebel turns against the government. The main character, Ishmael Beah, at age 12, face his hardest situation that took away his childhood. He has to find safety and his lost family.

The book follows a boy who was thrown into war in which he is primarily focused on avenging his family after hearing their final screams. Ishmael Beah and the song “Permanent Red” demonstrate how their anger brainwashed them and became the root of their actions. They both rely on anger and other things such as drugs to escape from other emotions rather than facing

The main character had to manage his father’s neglect while growing up. All Amir really wants is to be “looked at, not seen, listened to, not heard” (Hosseini 65), and while this conflict shapes the way that Amir grew up, readers are exposed to the

Mahfouz, as well as Said, shared a direct contact with the Arabian lifestyle because they grow up in that society. Mahfouz’s novel depicts the real world with the touches of the supernatural and mystic, but as a form of evil in the world not as exotic and uncivilized as the Europeans did. Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days “takes new depths and insights as it picks up from where the ancient story ends” (Fayez 229). Mahfouz uses the Arabian Nights tales and Shahryar’s and Scheherazade’s society to portray the contemporary social and political issues of his people. Mahfouz aims to show various thematic concerns of the people of the East than the early versions left out.

Many people also feel that this book is irrelevant to student’s lives. However, kids should learn what life would be like for kids at their age in a different time period. Like what was stated before, in a history class, when we learn about the history, we learn about the straight facts, not as much of the personal lives of people living in that time. Since the novel is showing the personal recollections of one boy in the time period, students can identify the similarities between the two lessons. Since the similarities will be present, the students could make connections to both of the

In October 1905, James Joyce wrote “Araby” on an unnamed narrator and like his other stories, they are all centered in an epiphany, concerned with forms of failures that result in realizations and disappointments. The importance of the time of this publication is due to the rise of modernist movement, emanating from skepticism and discontent of capitalism, urging writers like Joyce to portray their understanding of the world and human nature. With that being said, Joyce reflects Marxist ideals through the Catholic Church’s supremacy, as well as the characters’ symbolic characterization of the social structure; by the same token, psychoanalysis of the boy’s psychological and physical transition from one place, or state of being, to another is

Introduction The novel as well as the short story proclaimed a literature of the oppressed that extended hope to those who have none. This can be seen in three key dimensions of the Palestinian novel. First, there is a beautification of the lost homeland of Palestine. Palestine is portrayed in literature as a paradise on earth.

His attitude toward the city is displeasure. This can be understood through the imagery used to describe the town. Through this literary device, the speaker describes the elements of the town in great detail, and he makes known what elements he dislikes. The speaker portrays the town as having “grain scattered streets” and “barge crowded water.” These two descriptions are given with a negative tone, and they imply the negative attributes of the city.

In most coming-of-age novels, authors define childhood as the period of rose-colored glasses and complete innocence that comes to an end with a sudden profound revelation of reality; however, in Hassan, Amir, and Sohrab’s childhoods that was not the case. Their innocence was stolen from them; their rose-colored glasses shattered. The loss of the rose-colored glasses forces Amir, Hassan, and Sohrab to see reality before they could have a profound revelation and fully understand the harsh realities of life; they come of age and lose their innocence at far too young an age. Throughout the coming-of-age novel, The Kite Runner, loss of innocence is a very common theme made apparent via Amir, Hassan, and Sohrab; the theme, loss of childhood innocence, shapes the novel by introducing the themes of betrayal and redemption. Hassan’s loss of innocence assists in shaping the novel because when Hassan loses his childhood innocence, the novel’s protagonist, Amir, loses his childhood innocence as well.

In The Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges tells the story of Carlos Argentino Daneri, a mediocre poet on a quest to create a masterpiece- a poem that describes in detail all the places in the world. Upon receiving the news that his house will be demolished, Daneri is enraged. He confesses to the narrator that he needs the house to finish his poem, as the ceiling contains an Aleph, i.e. a point in space that contains all other points and he has been using it as an aide for his writing. The story ends with the narrator experiencing for himself the Aleph but refusing to acknowledge its existence to Daneri.

With the novel being read from a ‘twelve’ year old whose history motivates his understanding, perception and interpretation of the events he encounters and interprets to the reader,