The Epic Of Haroun Khalif's Ordinary World

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Recommended: Epic hero characteristics introduction

In the first stage of the hero epic, the reader enters the Ordinary World. The hero lives in a “sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name” (15). And in that sad city, beyond the “ruined buildings (which are looking) like broken hearts” there lives the protagonist Haroun Khalifa (15). He is a happy young child that “grew up in a home in which, instead of misery and frowns he had his fathers ready smile and his mother's sweet voice raised in song” (15). Haroun stands out against a background where he lives in a “small concrete house with pink walls, lime-green windows, and blue painted balconies with squiggly metal railings, all of which made it look more like a cake (18). This quoted section shows

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