Life and Death

“His arms and legs began a slow limp disjoint motion. ‘How loud the clamor is. But what are they screaming about? Do you remember? How quickly memories are slipping away. What do you want? To chant? What chant? Or just call out? To whom? For what? There’s a voice speaking inside you. Do you hear? Do you see? But where? There’s nothing. Nothing. Darkness and more darkness. A gentle motion pushing with the regularity of the ticking of a clock. The heart is flowing with it. There’s a whisper accompanying it. The gate of the garden. Isn’t that so? It’s moving in a fluid rippling way and slowly dissolving. The towering tree is dancing gently. The sky… the sky? High, expansive…nothing but the calm, smiling sky with peace raining from it”’ (493).

This paragraph is the description of Fahmy’s death. It describes the quick thoughts that flows through his mind as he is dying. there is a lot of questions racing through his head because as Tianna puts it "Death at the end of the novel poses a lot of questions in many people's minds and influences their actions" Death leaves things unaswered and pointless. It’s interesting how Naguib does not outright say Fahmy is shot and killed with a bullet. Death for Fahmy did not end with darkness and nothingness, it ended with peace. The thing he fights for and the reason why he’s in the demonstrations and risk his life for. Peace. Ahmad wonders, “ Peace? Where had it gone and when would it be ready to return? Even in his store there were distressing, whispered conversations about bloody events” (463). The revolution took away peace not only in the streets and in his store but in his very household since his rebellious son was so ready to demonstrate in the bloody revolution. Fahmy’s ‘peace’ will only be felt by him as his life slips away. His death brings the worse part of the war right in his home. All he wants is for everything to go back to normal but was the way everything was the best for his family and for his country. Death is the point of no return for change. Nothing will ever be normal or the way it was without Fahmy. Even though his death will change everything for his family but what about his country he fights for. His life is lost and his country is still not free. Ahmad tells his friend, “Fahmy learned how the boy had been lost and might just have never existed…the poor lad perished, but Sa’d didn’t return and the English didn’t leave” (466). Is all this death necessary for freedom? Is Fahmy’s death for his country really pointless? In the long run the demonstrations and rebellion are necessary. If the country continues to be submissive and servile to the English then nothing will ever change.
Toward the end of the book death and new life are being compared. Aisha and Khadija are pregnant and Aisha gives birth to her baby however it has a high risk of dying, Yasin’s mother dies, and Fahmy is killed in what is suppose to be a peaceful demonstration. Also Mahfouz includes small scares of death with Aisha, Ahmad, Kamal and Fahmy before he actually dies. Chapter 67 ends with gruesome descriptions of death that happened in al-Aziziya and Badrashin and chapter 68 begins with the birth of Aisha’s baby. Its no coincidence that Sa’d Pasha has been freed on the same day Aisha delivers her baby which happens in the next chapter. The revolution relates to Aisha’s birth because in a way it’s like a new birth of the nation and a new birth of freedom. Since Mahfouz does not kill of the baby, the reader is left with hope that it will live which compares to Sa’d Pasha’s return which gives people hope for the freedom of Egypt.

Bruno, Tianna. Death in the end. Digging Even Deeper. http://diggingevendeeper.blogspot.com/2010/03/death-in-end.html

Death in the End

“Death is new to me. I've never witnessed it before. I wish the end could come without it. We all die...really? I've got to resist my fears. Nowadays we hear about people dying all the time, on Ministries Street, in the schools, and at the mosque of al-Azhar...What can the families of the martyrs do? Should they spend the rest of their lives weeping? They weep and then forget. That's death”(428).

It seems that death is a very prominent theme at the end of the novel Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz. In almost every situation that they get into, death is the outcome to worry about. When Ahmad was trapped by the English soldiers after leaving the neighbor's house, he worries that he would be killed by the English soldiers. In the passage above, Yasin is worried about his mother dying. It makes him ponder about dying himself. When Aisha is having issues during labor, Ahmad and Khalil worried about her and her child's death.
We see the characters that appear to the reader to be really tough and inconsiderate of people's feelings have a heart. They think about and are saddened by the idea that life for everyone else goes on after people die. The dead are soon forgotten. There existence is no longer taken into consideration after a week after their death. These two characters are Ahmad and hi son, Yasin.
Ahamd, a man well respected by his family and his community, shows that he is not an all knowing and ready-for-everything being. As Daniela puts it, “we find out that he is not a God.” When death comes to someone close to him that he cares about, we see that he does not know what to do. He does not know how to break the news to his wife. He is simply hit unexpectedly and dumbfounded, which is something that he gets a lot from Fahmy at the end of the novel. Death is not something that anyone in the family was prepared to handle.
Mahfouz brings the theme of death into the novel when Yasin finds out about his mother's sickness. Yasin, who is called a “bull” and has treated woman as they are simply object to get sex from, shows a pensive and delicate side as his father did when confronted by death. Yasin learns from and mirrors a lot of Ahmad's actions, as Marixa says, “Yasin is influenced by his dad and the things that he sees at home.” This situation where Yasin has not seen his father, or anyone else for that matter, deal with this allows the readers to see Yasin in a new light. He questions life itself. When we see Yasin in the mosque praying, he is so sure about what he is doing. He knows not to ask for repentance because he would then have to give up his ways. He isn't troubled about getting a divorce from Zaynab, or at least that is how he tries to appear. But when his mother is stricken with malaria, he doesn't know what his next move will be. Should he cry? Should he part with her on good terms or will their relationship end as it has been existing all these years? Should he get mad at her new husband? He has all these questions because of one thing death
Death at the end of the novel poses a lot of questions in many people's minds and influences their actions. More people joined the demonstrations, probably, because they heard about the people that the soldiers had killed. Death made a huge footprint in the lives of may of the Egyptians at that time.



Work Cited
Mahfouz, Naguib. Palace Walk. New York: Anchor Books, 1991.

Rod., Marixa. "Courage & Influence." Digging Even Deeper. Web. 26 Mar. 2010. .

B., Daniela. "Hes Human After All." Digging Even Deeper. Web. 26 Mar. 2010. .