Isa is of course a symbol of all that the immediate past stands for. In his defense before the Purge Committee he excuses himself by pointing out that everyone behaved exactly as he did, and asks why it is that he is being singled out. However, in spite of Isa’s rapid and heavy fall, the past which he symbolizes throughout the novel does manage to display positive characteristics as well. For, unlike his friend Ibrahim Khairat, who almost immediately sets about penning hypocritical articles in praise of the revolution, Isa remains stubbornly loyal to the old regime and adamantly refuses to consider accepting the offer of a job from his cousin Hasan, who has become an important figure because of the revolution. This positive aspect of Isa’s character, his sense of loyalty and concern for his country, is perhaps best seen through his relationship with Qadriyya, the woman whom he eventually marries. At the outset Isa is aware that the marriage may not work and leaves himself an escape route by overlooking her previous marriages. But as the couple live together through the Suez Crisis of 1956, Isa is amazed by her total lack of concern with politics and the fate of Egypt. Qadriyya, the barren, overfed nonentity, brings out the positive side of Isa’s attitude.

On the intellectual level Isa seems to become reconciled to the idea of accepting the revolution and the changes which it is bringing about. But on every occasion his basic emotional instincts hold him back, at least until the very end of the novel. He suffers an internal conflict between mind and emotion, and it is in the latter area that the women of the novel play such an important role. If the marriage to Qadriyya, with its literal and figurative barrenness, is doomed from the start, then the relationship with Riri, the Alexandrian prostitute, represents Isa’s real fight with emotion, his total failure to meet his moral responsibilities, and his eventual realization through a very bitter lesson of what those responsibilities are. This relationship is as creative—literally—as that with Qadriyya is not. Isa’s failure to regain his real family (as he comes to call it) symbolizes the failure of his emotions to react responsibly to the circumstances in which his own past has left him. As he realizes this bitter fact and its consequences for the future, his life with Qadriyya emerges as the sham which it really is and always has been; in his own words, he has no home with her.