The title of Mahfouz’s story provides an important clue to the work’s central theme. Ostensibly a reference to the amount of time that passes over the course of the story, “half a day” is in fact a statement about the relative shortness of human life; as Mahfouz depicts it, the period from birth to death isn’t even comparable to a full 24 hours, but only to a school day.

This shortness, however, is as much a matter of perception as it is of reality. A human lifespan may indeed be brief in the grand scheme of things, but “Half a Day” implies that it seems briefer still because of the way in which many of us live our lives. Using the school the boy attends as a symbol for life itself, Mahfouz suggests that humans tend to lead an unreflective existence, too preoccupied by the mundane concerns of daily life to appreciate the passage of time: “Dust-laden winds and unexpected accidents came about suddenly, so we had to be watchful, at the ready, and very patient” (Paragraph 14). In many ways, Mahfouz associates this tendency to let life slip by with the nature of modern society, which requires us to spend much of our time at work or contending with other burdensome institutions;