The story ‘The Kite Runner’, written by Khaled Hosseini, takes place mainly during the war in Afghanistan. After the country became a republic instead of a monarchy, the former Soviet Union invaded the country. Many years later, the Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist movement , seized power in Afghanistan. This was accompanied by intense violence and the consequences were immense. Not only was Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, almost entirely destroyed, but the cost to human life was also huge. The Kite Runner describes the life of Amir. Before the war, he lived in Kabul with his father Baba, their servant Ali and Ali’s son Hassan. Hassan and Ali are from a lower class than Amir and Baba, but Amir and Hassan are best friends regardless.
The final guilt Amir struggles with is his guilt of apathy where he physically commits the action and instead of standing as a bystander becomes the person who committed the act, which gives him a different form of guilt. Amir feels apathy guilt through betraying his friend and kicking Hassan out of the house because he is a witness to the crime Amir has committed. Amir has guilt because he chases Hassan out, “I flinched, like I’d been slapped… Then I understood: This was Hassan’s final sacrifice for me… And that led to another understanding: Hassan knew. He knew I’d seen everything in that alley, that I’d stood there and done nothing. He knew I had betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time” (ch. 12). Amir
Intro: Critically acclaimed author and psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross once said “Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy.” This is a powerful quote explaining that humans are often searching for something in life, whethter they know it or not. Ross shows that searching for answers can cause bad things to happen and in order to get through them, humans search for forgiveness. In essence, humans are always searching for something on their journey through life. In this novel, the author demonstrates the journey of one boy through his struggles with
In the novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini tells the story of Amir, a young, Afghan boy who learns about what it means to be redeemed through the experiences he encounters in his life. The idea of redemption becomes a lesson for Amir when he is a witness to the tragic sexual assault of his childhood friend, Hassan. As a bystander in the moment, Amir determines what is more important: saving the life of his friend or running away for the safety of himself. In the end, Amir decides to flee, resulting in Amir having to live with the guilt of leaving Hassan behind to be assaulted. Hosseini shows us how Amir constantly deals with the remorse of the incident, but does not attempt to redeem himself until later in his life when Hassan has died.
The author puts a lot of moral ambitious character in the story the Kite Runner. Amir is an example of a moral ambitious character. He is evil in the beginning of the story, but as he matures and grows up as an adult. The Kite Runner By Khaled Hosseini, is a novel about a young boy named Amir and how he grows up in the Afghan war and how life was during the war. Amir's Moral Ambiguity is important to this story because he provides readers to like and hate him. The author provides the reader with mixed feeling about Amir.
By experiencing cruelty and the obstacles of ethnic differences, Amir’s closest and most loyal companion, Hassan, must deal with the issues that uncover the negative side of society causing Hassan’s loss of innocence throughout The Kite Runner. The foremost goal of Hosseini describing Hassan’s transformation from an ingenuous child to an individual warped by humanity’s imposed malevolence is to accentuate the character’s loss of innocence. As immorality shatters the purity within his life, Hassan encounters spite that is forced upon him, which contributes to the demise of his childhood naivety; for example, Amir views Hassan being sexually assaulted and threatened due to his ethnicity: “Hassan didn’t struggle. Didn’t even whimper. He moved
In the novel The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, there are many different important conflicts throughout the story. These conflicts are brought upon by the recurring motifs, such as redemption and loyalty. The different dissensions support the ideas of characterization by how they react to the sudden adversity in their lives. Amir attempts to redeem himself through Hassan’s son, Sohrab, by saving him and giving him a better life. Further developing the meaning of the story, connoting the mental struggle and the way priorities change over time, keeping readers mindful of the motifs and how they impact each character.
Everyone has heard the saying “nobody is perfect” and it is true we are all humans, we all make mistakes sometimes, but to what extent does someone stop forgiving when they have endured all the hardship a person gives them after they have been forgiven several times. There is a certain point in life when some people do not deserve to be forgiven because every time that person is forgiven, that person takes advantage it because that person knows they will be forgiven. There is one very prominent character in a story who fits the reason of why some people do not deserve forgiveness, especially when they've been given multiple chances to do the right thing. That person is Amir from the book the Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
Sacrifice, one the most prominent themes in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, clearly determines a person’s unconditional love and complete fidelity for another individual. Hosseini’s best-selling novel recounts the events of Amir’s life from childhood to adulthood. Deprived of his father’s approval and unsure of his relationship with Hassan, Amir commits treacherous acts which he later regrets and attempts to search for redemption. These distressing occurrences throughout his youth serve as an aid during his transition from a selfish child to an altruistic adult. On the other hand, his Hazara servant and childhood friend, Hassan, has always remained loyal to Amir even with his atrocious betrayal. His knowledge of Amir’s deceitful actions never impeded him from ultimately sacrificing himself for Amir’s benefit. Hassan’s compassionate and forgiving attitude added to Amir’s guilt, making it nearly impossible for him to forgive himself. Hassan’s tremendous sacrifice highlights his kind hearted nature, which eventually positively impacts Amir’s life turning him into a more appreciative person.
In Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, Amir struggles to cope with his inaction during Hassan’s rape. Overwhelmed with guilt, Amir devises a plan to get Hassan and Ali dismissed so they would no longer be a constant reminder of all the times Hassan had protected him and his failure to do the same. The guilt of betraying Hassan burdens him for years, and even after he and Baba move to America, he carries the weight of his actions with him. However, after he accepts Rahim Khan’s request to rescue Sohrab and bring him to safety, Amir strives to leave behind the selfishness and cowardice he had previously succumbed to. Amir progressively begins to forgive himself for his injustices towards Hassan as he recognizes his evolution from a coward
It is delineated by natural inclination that people sympathize with others who undergo an unfortunate circumstance or event. However, this type of behavior is dependent on how one uses prior knowledge to judge whether someone is worthy of sympathy. The idea that people tend to draw conclusions based on other people’s decisions and character remains as one of the many underlying themes in literature. In Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, Amir’s character is considered worthy of sympathy by his redeeming actions towards the end of the novel, his good intentions toward Baba, and his ability to empathize with others.
Novels can augment our perspective on the nature of mankind. One such book is Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner. The book follows a character named Amir as he goes through life as a child as well as his deep friendship with a boy named Hassan. A series of unfortunate events escalate a conflict prompting Amir with the need to resolve them. The book begins in medias res, until a phone call prompts the book to start back in the years of his youth. In the novel, Hosseini uses Amir’s internal conflict highlights how unresolved guilt and fear can negatively impact one’s life.
The Power of People: The Lasting Influence Rahim Khan has on Amir in The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
I don’t believe that Rahim’s dying wish is unfair, Amir owes it to Hassan to rescue his son, Sohrab. In the beginning, Amir sees it as unfair, he would be risking his life and everything he gained in America, to rescue a boy he has never meet. “I have a wife in America, a home, a career, and a family. Kabul is a dangerous place, you know that, and you’d have me risk everything for…” (221). Amir believes that what Rahim is asking of him is too much, too much of a risk. Rahim believes that this action, will help amend the lies Amir said in his past. Rahim tells Amir, “ It has never been about money with money with me, you know that. And why you? I think we both know why is has to be you, don’t we?” (221). After, Rahim drops the bomb of Baba being
Internal conflict relies on the struggles within a person that are based on interpersonal impulses. In literary works, internal conflict can focus mainly on the psychological struggle of a character, whose solution creates the suspense of the story’s plot itself. This concept is quite vital throughout the novel The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan-born American novelist and medical doctor. In the book, Amir, the protagonist, is constantly battling himself and his own skewed logic as to what it means to redeem oneself. Redemption, defined as a person saving himself from any sin, error or evil, comes out through Amir’s strange notions about how he can forgive himself for wrongdoings, mainly with the alley rape of his father’s young servant.