The not so pleasant journey into the mind of the character

When one starts reading Naguib Mahfouz's The Thief and the Dogs the weird use of italics in the middle of the text come across as one of the most intriguing parts. In these words, the narration suddenly shifts into a First Person narration that is practically being delivered as a monologue by Said towards some characters that are completely unknown to the reader. And yet, despite this unconventional break in the narration structure of the  novel, Mahfouz manages to convey his story in an extremely effective way that remains intuitive right off the first paragraph that does this, when the only context that is given is that he just came out of prison and that the weather's hot.

The stream of consciousness in Mahfouz's novel is perhaps the most natural and fluid progression ever. The author jumps around from one point in time to another inside the stream but it still seems perfectly natural. In a sense, the flow of Said's thoughts in The Thief and the Dogs is modeled after the way the human mind records and remembers events. We do not remember things in a linear progression, but rather we tend to recall things at different times in different order, the memories are all cut up, split up and distorted and this shows through in Said's stream of consciousness. He rarely recalls a memory on a specific person fully from the start. It is not until episode ten that we hear the story of how he fell in love with Nabawiyya and it's in episode ten that we learn of how his father died; both of these memories are revealed much after Said makes a first mention of them during the first and second episode respectively. Said recalling his memories in a scattered and discontinuous manner does not throw off the reader because it is natural for us to do that kind of remembering. Replaying a scene from our past in our heads comes natural, and Mahfouz uses this to his advantage to capture the reader and make his novel interesting.

One of the most interesting aspects of the stream of consciousness however, has to do with how the discontinuity and brokenness of his thoughts as well as the progression of the wrath he feels evolves throughout the story. Throughout the first chapters his thoughts are usually coherent and don't vary from one topic to another too suddenly.