Comparing Mahfouzs “Half a day” and Hallidays “Young Man on Sixth Avenue”Many people feel that life goes by very rapidly. The stories “Half a day” by Naguib Mahfouz, and “Young Man on Sixth Avenue” by Mark Halliday, both convey this point. These two stories are very similar in the point they put across, but very different in the way they convey the theme to the reader.
The short story, “Half a Day” by Naguib Mahfouz starts with a young boy walking to school with his father, on a street surrounded by gardens. As the school day went by it is actually his life flying by. At first, walking into school, he saw himself as a child. When the school day let out, he left to see himself as a familiar middle aged man. As he continued on the extremely different street, he was confronted by a little boy who called him grandpa. This all showed how life can fly by, as short as half a day.
The next short story, “Young Man on Sixth Avenue” by Mark Halliday focuses in on a young man walking through the big city of Manhattan. Unlike “Half a day”, as the man walked along, the author just stated the things that were happening in this man’s life year after year. This portrays an image that life flies by as rapidly as just walking down the street, but the man doesn’t physically change as he walks down the street.
Both “Half a day” by Mahfouz and “Young Man on Sixth Avenue” have a similar theme of how rapidly life can pass you by, but were also different in many ways. In “Half a Day” the main character was shown to physically change throughout the story as the boy saw himself. In “Young Man on Sixth Avenue”, the main character did not change along his walk, but found himself on the same street as an elderly man, that he was on as a young man. These works of literature show in different ways that life can pass you by very rapidly, like half a day at school, or a walk along a busy street.
