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.