Half a Day

In Naguib Mahfouz's piece, the beginning starts off with the narrator as a young child starting his first day of school, but ends with the narrator as an old man looking around and seeing how his hometown has changed. I thought that the idea of this flashback to the memory of childhood was a very interesting thing to write about and it made me think about the meaning of the story even more than I normally would. Also, the end was a bit open, so I got to take some guesses about why the elderly man had this experience and what it meant to him.