The Passage to a Fantastic Analysis

Chapter Eight

Passage:

He dreamed that he was in jail, being whipped despite his good conduct, screaming shamelessly, but not offering any resistance. They gave him milk to drink. Suddenly he saw little Sana, lashing Rauf Ilwan with a whip at the bottom of a staircase. He heard the sound of a Koranic recitation and had a conviction that someone had died, but found himself, a wanted man, somehow involved in a car chase! The car he was driving was incapable of speed--there was something wrong with its engine--and he had to begin shooting in every direction, when all at once Rauf Ilwan appeared from the radio in the dashboard, grabbed his wrist before Said was able to kill him, and tightened his grip so mercilessly that he was able to snatch the revolver. At this point Said Mahran said to him: "Kill me, if you wish, but my daughter is innocent. It wasn't she who whipped you at the bottom of the staircase. It was her mother, Nabawiyya, at the instigation of Ilish Sidra."

Analysis

This extract from the novel comes when Said is staying at the Sheikh’s house after the attempted but failed murder of Ilish. This comes at a point where Said is pleased with himself for the (at this point) assumed success but in the presence of the Sheikh, he feels guilty.

It is clearly a dream sequence, but Mahfouz surprises the reader as most of the flashbacks that occur in the novel are very positive ones in order to juxtapose Said’s unhappiness in the present time, and most an audience is generally accustomed to a dream being positive. Instead, the author exposes us to a violent and panicking situation like the one we and Said are already in.

This could be done in order to comment on the paranoia that Said is feeling in his current situation and the paranoia of living under a dictatorship. This would be supported by the illogical sequence of events within the dream, where he first sees Sana lashing Rauf then all of a sudden is in a car chase, then Rauf is coming out of the dashboard. This is done to show the mindset of Said at this time, him clearly not being in a stable mental condition.

Said’s dream seems to be very concerned with the theme of justice, something prevalent throughout the entire novel. He finds himself in jail, perhaps a flashback to his four-year imprisonment, where he is being punished despite what he thinks to be “good conduct”. This could mimic the idea that he believes that he is being wrongly punished.

Despite this, Said clearly accepts his inevitable death as a tragic hero, provided that his own daughter who pushed him away is safe. He clearly has concern that his own reputation as a criminal must not tarnish hers, but rather the one who he believed was the cause of his further criminal activity, Nabawiyya.