Carol Dell'Amico teaches English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where she is currently working on a dissertation. The essay which follows presents "Half a Day" as a story in which there are two allegories. One allegory is argued to have universal significance and the second to refer specifically to Egyptian history.

"Half a Day" is an allegory in which a child's experiences at school symbolize a typical person's experiences of coming of age and maturation. This allegory is achieved through a multiplication and overlapping of "times." That is, the boy's narration suggests more than one unit of time (some obvious units or concepts of measure are: one minute, childhood, one light year, an average human life-span, a millennium, and so forth).

The narration about the school day engages four different times. First, it is understood to cover a school day, that is, almost the...