The Thief and the Dogs

Said Mahran is released from prison with a burning agenda. Though he is the protagonist of the novel, he is never portrayed as sympathetic. Instead, Mahfouz allows the reader access to Said’s violent and paranoid internal monologue by employing a stream-of-consciousness style of writing. Yet Mahfouz maintains the stakes of Said’s attempts at revenge by portraying his enemies as equally unsympathetic. Ilish was a thief, just like Said, and Nabawiyya helped Said prepare to burglarize properties. Ilwan once condoned Said's crimes and provided an ideological justification for stealing from wealthy people. Said's three targets are just as complicit in his crimes; the difference is that they are also guilty of hypocrisy and disloyalty, seeking to distance themselves from Said after his arrest. Through these morally compromised characters, Mahfouz portrays a world in which everyone is tainted by fear, narcissism, and greed. Though Said is also guilty of all of these faults, he considers himself superior because he remains loyal. Said's moral code is complex and hypocritical—a thief who demands honesty from others. Told from Said’s perspective, The Thief and the Dogs positions the disloyalty of Ilish, Ilwan, and Nabawiyya as more of a crime than Said’s thefts and murders, which the protagonist feels are justified. By making Said an unsympathetic and unreliable narrator, Mahfouz allows the reader to examine Said’s moral code more objectively, rather than suggesting that Said’s example is one to be followed.

In the rising action of the novel, Said discovers that the world is not as it once was before he went to prison. Ilish is now married to Said's ex-wife Nabawiyya, and Ilwan has betrayed his revolutionary politics and become a comfortable rich man who preaches about the importance of the status quo. The world and the people within it have completely changed, while Said remains just as he was before he went to prison. As such, the novel suggests that prison did not change Said. Instead, prison held him in stasis while the world moved forward without him. Said's loss of freedom also meant the loss of his ability to change and grow. Prison froze his personality and prevents him from changing, suggesting that the Egyptian prison systems of the novel’s contemporary era were intended to punish rather than reform. After the loss of his freedom, Said is dealt an additional punishment. Released into a world which he does not recognize, Said is forced to become an anachronistic figure, unsure of his place in the new order of things. Imprisonment has resulted in an identity crisis for Said, which he attempts to resolve through revenge.

In Ilwan, Mahfouz presents his most acute critique of the new Egyptian government after the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. Ilwan represents a perceived abandonment of the ideological goals that drove the coup d’état against King Farouk and ushered in radical societal, economic, and political change in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. Nationalistic and Anti-Imperial, the aftermath of the Egyptian Revolution left some people disappointed and disillusioned. Mahfouz portrays Said as still committed to his radical politics, without the advantages of wealth and education that have allowed Ilwan to abandon his ideals for luxury. Mahfouz complicates Said’s moral reasoning by exacerbating Said’s challenges of poverty and lack of education with his criminal record and sense of abandonment.  

Despite Said's many grudges, he is still able to recognize beauty in the world. He may loathe the individuals in his life, but he acknowledges that people are smaller components of a greater and more wondrous world. As he watches the sun rise in Chapter 4, he feels an overwhelming sense of awe. Said may hate the world he finds outside of prison, but he takes comfort in the idea that the universe is operating at a larger scale than anything he can affect. Said surrenders himself to the greater power of nature, and Mahfouz suggests that nature, the universe, and the passage of time are comforting thoughts in a paranoid, individualistic world.