Emotional Pain In The Kite Runner

Make it Stop
Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, explores deeply the topics of pain and punishment. He shows how the the pain characters receive affect their lives. Most characters suffer from physical pain, but what really haunts them is their emotional pain. Through his novel, Hosseini demonstrates how people often seek physical punishment in order to escape their emotional pain, but are not able to.
Physical punishment is preferable due to the fact that emotional pain is much stronger than physical pain. Amir endures extreme physical pain when Assef is beating him up. Later in the hospital, once he has fully regained his consciousness he says “I thought about what had happened to me. Ruptured spleen. Broken teeth. Punctured lung. Busted eye socket” (297). One would think that he

The use of short sentences illustrates how these are passing thoughts, and even though he says he thought about what had happened to him, he is not thinking about the physical pain or injuries, rather how it affected him emotionally. Because the emotional pain of his betrayal to Hassan is lessened, he is not bothered by his physical pain. This is due to the fact that the emotional relief he experiences is much greater than the physical pain of his injuries. On the other hand, while he is waiting to hear whether Sohrab will live, he feels much greater pain. He says “I want to tear myself away from this place, from this reality...But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away. There will be no other reality tonight” (345). In contrast to the previous quote, he explains now in much detail how miserable he is. This shows how unbearable his emotional pain is in contrast to his previous physical pain. He implies that he wishes his