Why does the book end with Kamal?

“Visit me once each year, For it’s wrong to abandon people forever” (498).

Before we talked about this passage in class, I was planning to focus more on Khadija and Aisha’s pregnancies, but when we went over this I was interested so I decided to write about this. But we talked about why Mahfouz chose to end the book this way, with him walking in the door to Kamal singing this song. I was more interested in why Mahfouz chose to end the book with Kamal, the most insignificant significant character.

Kamal was seen through my eyes as one of the characters that a lot of people blew off, but he offered an important role to a lot of the situation in the book that were significant to the over all theme of innocence and honor. Kamal is seen as just a little kid

that likes to ask a lot of questions and annoy people by his mother and his siblings, but his father views him very negatively in the beginning. Kamal doesn’t feel the love from his father that his older brothers feel and is therefore, in an emotional sense, closer to his his sisters Khadija and Aisha and his mother Amina. We can see Kamal’s feelings when he says, “In that coffee hour Kamal frequently felt lost and neglected by his family. Hardly anyone paid attention to him” (53). To see the book end with Ahmad walking in on Kamal’s singing, is something I never would’ve expected as an ending.

Ivan inspects Kamal’s role in the book when it comes to innocence and freedom. He talks about the scene in the book where Kamal is asking his mom for freedom to go out at night and seek entertainment or whatever he wants and his mom is talking to him letting him know he’s too young right now because he isn’t working yet. And Aby, in her blog "...his young heart found hard to bear" explores his feeling for girls that are already developing at a very young age and his relationship with Maryam and how he had to sacrifice it because his brother wanted to marry her. Both of these are two scenes that are described in great detail and are in a sense determining factors for the way we see him and the people he interacts with in the book. Ivan even notices how he tries to be like his father and get the freedom he sees they have that he feels he should be able to get when he’s able to work. This just shows how much he loves and aspires to be like his father and older brothers. He just wants something different than what he has. He wants to be able to do what he pleases without being told he can’t because he’s too young or inexperienced. Kamal plays a very important role in the way we think of Ahmad in the book. We can see how much Kamal respects and fears his father, “His respect for him was as great as his fear” (50). Kamal wants to be able to have a relationship with his father, but Ahmad seems to be so interested in himself that he doesn’t even notice that his son is craving attention and love from him. Or, maybe, he just doesn’t care. Ahmad says himself that he feels his son is immature and he plays too much. He doesn’t pay Kamal very much attention but the chapter ends with Ahmad walking in on Kamal singing and enjoying the same thing his father does.

1. Mahfouz, Naguib. Palace Walk (Cairo Trilogy). New York: Anchor, 1991. Print.