The Kite Runner



The Kite Runner

Khaled Hossenin

About the Author

The Kite Runner is Khaled Hossenini’s first novel. It tells the story of a young man who leaves Afghanistan as a young man and emigrates to America. While Hossenin says that “I don’t have that much in common with Amir,” they share an understanding of these two cultures. Hossenini is an Afghan by birth, the eldest of five children. His mother was a secondary teacher in Kabul. Hossenini’s father had a diplomatic post in the Afghanistan in 1978 when the communist coup occurred. Rather than returning to Kabul at the end of this posting, he and his family sought political asylum in America. The family settled in San Jose. Hossenin later studied medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. He is now married with two children.

About The Book

“I want people to simply remember Afghanistan,” explains Hosseini in an interview with Riverhead books when asked what he hoped his novel would achieve. Certainly the setting of the text is central to the way that the story develops.

So often we are told that “only in Afghanistan” can the coincidences that form the narrative line of the novel occur. Certainly coincidence or a circularity of experience is central to the plot.

The city of Kabul is evoked by the narrator Amir’s recollection of the sights, sounds and smells. The reader follows Amir through the colourful streets and little known byways. The pomegranate tree in the abandoned cemetery where Amir and Hazzan carve their inscription, “the sultans of Kabul” is easy for the reader to imagine, as are the bells calling the faithful to prayer. We see the annual kite battle with all its colour and drama set in the winter streets and the boys with bloodied hands cutting the kites. We come to recognize the smells of kabob on the streets and the feelings of freedom and joy that Amir experiences as he explores them in his childhood. Always though his childhood is shadowed by the confession at the beginning of the novel, as Amir’s memory of this childhood is shadowed by the knowledge of the treachery he was building towards. It was his self absorption and lack of understanding that allowed the child Amir to feel that his life and his city were an idyll. Amir reflects Afghanistan’s belief in itself at the time. Certainly life could be casually brutal and the seeds of Amir’s fate and Afghanistan’s fate were sowed at this time. Brutality and cruelty was about to increase and the destruction wrought was to be disastrous for everyone.

It is clear that Amir loves his homeland and clear too that it becomes uninhabitable for him. Just as the country itself sinks into an abyss of misery and destruction Amir is haunted and hunted by the memory of his betrayal of Hassan. Hassan, Amir’s half brother and alter ego, is the unacknowledged son of the intensely charismatic Baba. Driven by jealousy and an almost pathological desire for his father’s approval, Amir makes Hassan his sacrifice. Amir himself acknowledges the link between what he does when he watches in the alley and the Eid-Al-Adha the ceremony including the sacrificial killing of a sheep. “I imagine the animal understands. I imagine the animal sees its imminent demise is for a higher purpose.” There is no “higher purpose” in the sacrifice that Amir asks of Hassan only “the worst sin of all, theft.” The theft is of Hassan’s success in running down the last kite of the tournament; it is the theft of Hassan’s innocence and the ultimate proof that Amir would sacrifice the boy who loved him for a piece of coloured paper.

Amir feels that he can no longer live in a world inhabited by the memories of his betrayal. He ‘aspires to cowardice” to avoid facing the truth he is too honest to deny about why he stood and watched Assef rape Hassan. The memories follow him even to America, despite his claims that he can leave them at the “bottom of a fast flowing river”. The secret torments him. It is too dreadful ever to be told, even to the woman who loves him. His love of Afghanistan, even of his father, is always overshadowed by this secret.

Baba is a character who is larger than life. He wrestles bears, builds orphanages, helps everyone, and is everyone’s hero. Amir aspires to be loved by his father. However he is destined always to be disappointed. His father can barely “believe that he is my son.” Always Amir is aware of the competition he loses with Hassan to fulfil his father’s expectations. Of course the reader clearly sees that it is never a competition. Hassan’s first word is Amir’s name and his life is dedicated to Amir in a way we find abhorrent. While only a child Hassan washes Amir’s clothes, cooks his food, “reads his mind”, calms his anxieties, fights his battles, serves as the butt of his jokes and as an adult dies in his family’s service. Hassan is presented as a saint-like creature eking out a pitiful existence in a mud hut. His character is painted for the reader by the tortured memory of Amir who so often took advantage of his innocence and dedication. Amir is aware of his guilt and of his affluence. This knowledge stops us from judging him too harshly. In America, free of the comparison with Hassan, Amir and Baba find a peace. Before Baba’s death Amir finally comes to feel that he is loved and respected by his father perhaps even as much as Ali loved Hassan. Baba even finally reads Amir’s stories with pride. As his father dies, Amir feels intensely the hole that his passing leaves. He admires his father for his courage and bravery, his dignity, his work ethic and his capacity to sacrifice himself. It is when Amir realizes that his father can personify all these qualities and still be an adulterer, a liar and worst of all a “thief” that he comes to understand the complexity of life and the responsibility that is Baba’s legacy.

“There is a way to be good again.” The return journey to Kabul is about seeking salvation by facing the past and by recognizing that love and selfless acceptance of duty is the only path to maturity and happiness. The photo of Hassan and his son happy and confident in the life that has been dealt to him contrasts with Amir’s self conscious existence. Unlike Hassan, Amir doubts the value of his work, has never been entirely honest with his wife and believes a “mean streak” exists within him. Unlike Hassan, Amir has been denied the role, revered by Afghanis, of fatherhood. “Some things are not meant to be,” he is told by his father-in-law. “Some things

are meant not to be,” is what Amir believes. He is not worthy of fatherhood because of his past sins. However, he sets out to rescue Hassan’s son and in doing to rescues his own, and his father’s, honour.

The Kabul that he visits is a hideous parody of the idyll he remembers. Slowly he comes to understand not just the depth of suffering that he sees – that boys watching his hand while he eats are not admiring his multifunction, water proof watch, but are watching scare food disappearing – but also what he has seen. The Kabul of his childhood was not the real Afghanistan, that he has always been a “tourist.”

His experience in Taliban dominated Kabul are anything but a holiday. However, there is salvation to be found in righting the wrongs of the past and belatedly fighting his own battles. It is important that he acknowledges Sohrab as his nephew, but it is redemption that he finds in facing the psychopath Assef. The coincidence of meeting with Assef and being rescued by a small scared Hazara boy with a slingshot represents the completion of a cycle of experience and this time Amir can move forward with his life without being swamped by regrets.

“The thing about you Afghanis is that you are a little reckless.” Amir is and at great cost to Sohrab. Amir, in failing to treat Sohrab as the traumatized child that he is and in reneging on a promise, takes a risk. He and Sohrab pay a terrible price and suddenly the text goes full circle and Amir becomes the supplicant begging for a chance to be of some small use. In the novel’s final image of Amir running to retrieve a kite that may bring “only a smile” to Sohrab’s eyes and that will not make “anything alright” we see Amir content and happy. Finally Amir understands Hassan’s dedication when he says “for you a 1000 times over.”

The novel’s ending, “all that matters” in Afghanistan, is optimistic. Amir is not “nah-kam” but well on the way to becoming “kamyab”. The roles have changed. Amir not Hassan, is the “kite runner.”

Some Central Ideas

The central concept of loyalty and betrayal – how could Amir leave Hassan in the alley with Assef

The concept of growing up and accepting yourself and your limitations and the limitations of your heroes

The concepts of love and jealousy between fathers and sons

The concept of redemption – “there is a way to be good again”

The concept of patriotism – what it means to love a country and its culture but live life in another country and maintain your identity

Racism and its consequences

The Main Characters

Amir

Amir “became what (he) is at the age of 12.” For him the past could not be buried. It “claws its way out.” Amir tells the painful story of his life as a journey punctuated by flashbacks and constant foreshadowing. He can never be free of the memory of his childhood companion Hassan; the person who loved him most selflessly. Countless times we are told of the bond between two babies who drink from the same breast as Amir castigates himself for his past actions.

As a child Amir seems at once arrogant and cold, and yet desperate for his father’s regard and approval. He feels great jealousy towards Hassan the hairlipped Hazara who, despite being much more socially vulnerable that Amir, faces the world more honestly and more bravely. Hassan is Baba’s true son; facing the world with Baba’s courage and resourcefulness and Amir senses this and hates him for it. Amir deliberately keeps a distance between Hassan and his father. He lies to keep them apart. Amir constantly taunts Haasan. His “favourite part of reading” was the opportunity to “tease him, expose his ignorance” and Amir rejects him as a companion often. Amir also relies on Hassan’s care, companionship and his respect. His childhood is inextricably entwined with Hassan’s. They are as close as brothers. Amir relies on Hassan as a protector and a guide. It is with Hassan that he shares his first story; it is with Hassan that he pursues his greatest pleasure – flying kites – and it is with Hassan that he “spent the first 12 years of his life.” For Amir “the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile.” Yet he uses him and betrays him brutally. “I never thought of Hassan and me as friends.” “In the end I was a Pastun and he was a Hazara………….nothing was ever going to change that.”

Amir, unlike Hassan, is always finding his courage failing him. Even when Soraya tells him her darkest secret before Iatz – the ceremony of giving word – Amir does not offer his. It is only when his father’s past sins are exposed that Amir feels obligated to address the wrongs of his childhood. We admire his actions in braving the Taliban to rescue Sohrab, when he like Rostam, comes to recognize Sohrab as “his long-lost son”. However, it is the images at the end of the novel when he struggles to find the child buried under layers of trauma by “running with a swarm of screaming children” that we feel most warmly towards him. Always Amir’s honesty as a narrator has endeared him to us, finally we see him free of the burden of the past and we feel his relief and his joy.

Baba

Baba, “the bear wrestling” hero of Kabul, is a character who is larger than life. He is generous to everyone and yet he seems incapable of loving his son. He feels that his son has something “missing”. It is not until the end of the novel that we understand the guilt that Amir, the legitimate son, inspired in his father. In betraying his own childhood companion Ali in “the worst way possible” Baba laid the foundation for the next generation’s betrayal – “like father, like son.” It is hard to imagine the regret that must have filled Baba for his lapse. Baba believes that difficult times “don’t negate decency… (they) demand it” and that he would “take a thousand bullets rather than let (an) indecency take place.” Despite this he sleeps with the Haraza wife of his childhood companion. The suffering that being faced with his sin every day by the presence of Hassan in his house must have been enormous and yet he took great pride in Hassan too. He preferred him, in fact, to his own son and “wished” him present at all significant family events such as Amir’s high school graduation. The agony that Baba faced when, through his legitimate son’s actions, he was forced to part from his childhood companion Ali, and his son, was obvious. The legendary hero was reduced to tears and begging when the son he “loved equally” left. Yet even then his “honour” was such that he could not admit the truth. Rahim Khan explains that it “was a shameful situation.” “All a man had back then was, all he was, was his honour.” But even years later in another country Baba never admitted his sin. When Baba left for America it was for Amir because he would have no future in Afghanistan, but he left Hassan –who was far more vulnerable - there because he would not admit what he had done. The images of Baba bravely facing down a drunk Russian soldier; facing a menial and humiliating existence to give his son a future and bravely facing cancer, dying on his own terms do not tally with a coward abandoning his other son to save face. The reader is as confused as Amir by the revelations. Slowly the reader and Amir realize the implications of the truth that Hassan is the true inheritor of all that is noble in this proud Pastun line. Hassan has always been true. The saving of Sohrab seems so much an action that the hero Baba should have undertaken. In the end, Baba’s character is the one over-shadowed by the betrayal of the past. Whatever his suffering, his stubborn refusal to admit his fault and pursue his responsibility at the expense of his reputation lead us to judge him harshly.

Hassan

In many ways Hassan is presented as a two dimensional character. “I’m starting to forget their faces,” says Sohrab and to an extent so too is Amir the narrator. He has been haunted by the past for so long in a way it is the ghosts that he remembers. Hassan is presented as an almost saint-like figure – often self sacrificing, always forgiving and understanding and always honourable. Rather than a simplistic attempt by Hossein to make the reader feel the injustices that occur to Hassan more deeply, this is the interpretation of a guilty narrator. We see Amir’s memory of Hassan as infinitely wise, always noble, brave and infinitely forgiving. Certainly we know that Baba and Rahim Khan admired him and that Ali loved him. However, it is in Amir’s tortured memory that he has become a saint. It is Amir who interprets the look on Hassan’s face as he realizes in the alley the extent to which Amir is prepared to betray him. It is Amir, who continued to punish himself for his actions years later, who presents us with Hassan’s character. And Amir is not always a reliable narrator. His childhood memories are shown at times to be false. It is hard therefore for the reader to make judgements about Hassan because we do not meet the character we meet the memory of a brother betrayed.

Workbook Questions

1. Do you feel that Baba’s betrayal of Ali and Amir’s betrayal of Hassan are inevitable in a country with two classes of citizen or do you think that their betrayals reflect personal flaws?

2. Chart the changes that Amir experiences in his feelings towards his father through out the novel.

3. What is the significance of the permanent scar that Amir carries as a result of the fight with Assef?

4. Chart the stages of Amir’s journey to self acceptance.

5. Who is “the kite runner” and how do the opening and closing images of the text create a circle of experience?

6. Amir talks of both Hassan and Sohrab as being “sacrificial lambs” do you think this is accurate?

7. “I didn’t want to sacrifice for Baba any more.” Does Amir sacrifice himself for his father?

8. Amir and his father after failing to “close the chasm” between them reach a kind of peace in America. What was the relationship between the two?

9. Who suffers more as a result of their betrayal of a childhood companion Baba or Amir?

10. “You’re so different to every other Afghan guy I’ve met.” Is Amir a good husband?

Analytical Mode

Part 1

1. “the tree hasn’t borne fruit in years”

Amir’s life is a story of compounding failure.

Discuss

2. “I became what I am today at the age of twelve”

Do Amir’s opening words prove to be accurate?

Part 2

1. “For you a thousand times over.”

The Kite Runner demonstrates the destructive power of love.

2. “One last gift for Amir”

Duty and honour are the most powerful forces in life.

Is this your interpretation of The Kite Runner?

Creative

1. Write the conversation between Ali and Hassan after Hassan has been accused of theft?

2. “By the time I was done with my story she was weeping.” Write the story that Amir told Soraya on the phone from Pakistan?

Oral Explorations

1. Present a modern history of Afghanistan to the class and explain the complex links between the Pastuns and Hazaras and the Sunnai and the Shi’a.

2. Compare the lives lived by Amir and Baba in Kabul and in Fremont California. How do the changes bring out the best in them?

3. “Baba is sitting on the bear’s chest. He looks up at me, and I see. He’s me I am wrestling the bear.” Present your view about who the hero of the novel was.

References and Further Resources















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