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those emotions which lower man from the ideal of Man:
fear, sex, hunger, greed, and desire for worldly
pleasures of the flesh. The least successful of these
stories is the one based on hunger and eating, "Hadiyon
As dhanc." This story, like many others by Intizar,
carries the message that the protagonist, who at first
thinks himself superior to his animalistic fellow
citizens (as did Alyasef in "Akhiri Admi,· discussed in
Chapter Three), in fact shares with them the
characteristics which he condemns in them. The story
begins on the level of remembered tales and incidents
from the protagonist's boyhood, with occasional shifts to
a second level in the present in which he does little
more than state that he is remembering these incidents.
The second half of the story is set almost entirely in
the protagonist's present as he sits in a restaurant,
eating and watching others eat, and recalling the tales
and incidents introduced in the first half.
The story lacks integration, both between the two
halves of the remembered tales and the scenes in the
restaurant, and between the tales themselves. The first
tale, for instance, is the story of a man who dies
unattended by any of his fellow citizens and is then
inhabited by a j1nn who continually demands food from the
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