Genre
Short Stories / Egyptian Literature
Setting and Context
Set in Cairo, Egypt, and small towns on its outskirts.
Narrator and Point of View
Third-person narration
Tone and Mood
Emotional, Honest, Dark, Sad
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonists are working-class individuals while the antagonist is the oppression by the power structures.
Major Conflict
The short stories depict the lives of the working class navigating poverty while falling victim to economic inequality and power dynamics. In this changing world, moral myopia and lack of compassion render the existence of village and city folks much more difficult.
Climax
The climax of the titular short story occurs when the protagonist goes into a rage and threatens the lives of the people penetrating the fence.
Foreshadowing
In “The Queue” the mention of iron fencing around the marketplace foreshadows the chaos that led to the material used for the fence.
Understatement
In “Hard Up” Abdou understates the physical cost of donating half a liter of blood every week.
Allusions
In “All on a Summer’s Night” Mohamed asserts “Then nothing. Boy, what a night! Better than anything in The Arabian Nights.”
Imagery
“People from the villages to the west had only to cross the agricultural road and go through the gate to be inside the marketplace. But for those coming from the villages to the east it was more complicated. For the pathways sloping down from their villages all converged at the old water-wheel into a single path ending at a point in the east fence facing the gate in the west fence.”
Paradox
In “A Quarter of a Jasmin Patch” the landowner attempts to show the peasants how to perform hard labor yet they are more experienced.
Parallelism
“A gathering that occurs at regular intervals announcing, like an enormous human clock, the lapse of seven days in which fortunes were made and fortunes were lost, in which some people earned their wages honestly, some dishonestly; when some found food in abundance while others starved. It measures the span of life.”
Metonymy and Synecdoche
“And so life went on providing their daily bread”
Daily bread is a synecdoche for sustenance.
Personification
“The night was huge and black and fearful, full of secret whispers.”
