A Thousand Splendid Suns is such a good book of family and love from violence to hugs. This book was set in Afghanistan from the early 1960s to the early 2000s. One of the main characters, Mariam, lives in Herat, a small town in Afghanistan.Some other main characters are Laila, Rasheed and Tariq. Laila and Mariam both live under the control of Rasheed. This book really shows love, war, violence and feminism throughout the novel. In A Thousand Splendid Suns you see the theme love through Mariam, Laila, Aziza and Tariq.
Mariam and Laila at first don’t have a very close blond with each other. They both didn’t know what to think about each other. When the rocket struck Laila, Rasheed and Mariam helped her. Mariam would also listen for Laila’s shoes every morning coming down the stairs. They’re bond kept getting closer and closer.. They really don’t have anyone else to talk too and they tell each other about all their problems. One day in the winter, Laila asked to braid Mariam’s hair, because that was one of the few things she enjoyed. “Mariam sat still and watched Laila’s slim fingers in the mirror tighten her plaits.”(Hosseini 255). Laila was making the braids as tight as possible, so that it would look good. This just shows how much closer they have become. They’re like best friends and they don’t even realize it yet. They wanted to do so many things together. Laila especially wanted to flee from Rasheed, because he is so abusive to her and doesn’t appreciate her. “We’re
A world of peace and love is all anyone ever hopes for. Imagine having to say goodbye to your country because of war. Feeling safe is one of the most important things in life. You need to feel safe for a place to be home. “One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls”(Hosseini 347). In A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, the characters are threated in the country they call home, because of war. The cultural aspects, character storylines, and themes of the book is what make this book a cultural lesson.
Women often undergo oppression and subjugation by the male dominated society. Women were merely slaves to the men as they would clean, sweep, work, while they have to maintain their obedience and sanity. Women were targets of oppression outside their work where men abused their wives as they were an entity for their sexual desires when they felt the need to. This exact relationship of “owner - possession” can be seen through the relationships between Rasheed and Mariam, also with Janie and her husbands. Both novels, A Thousand Splendid Suns and Their Eyes were Watching God, show that women have a lower social status, power, and legal rights when women had become property to eyes of men.
A Thousand Splendid Suns was written by Khaled Hosseini. It is a fictional novel about Afghanistan. It explores the hardships that two Afghan women endured. The first character we meet, Mariam, was disgraced before she was ever born. She was the result of scandalous activity and was oblivious to the lies that her father fed her. After her mother’s suicide, Mariam’s father, Jalil, arranged for her to be married in an attempt to erase his mistake. Laila is the second main character. She has almost everything a young girl could want, except for a loving mother. Laila considers herself to be fortunate, until tragedy strikes. With wars heating up in Afghanistan, Laila loses her friend
Liala shows this in a big way, when she chooses to keep rasheed kid. She was ready to abort the baby “And there had been enough killing already. Laila had seen enough killing of innocents caught in the crossfire of enemies”(Hosseini 284), saying that she is going to keep the baby. Her war was with rasheed and not the baby so why take a life that doesn’t deserve to die. She had lost everyone she ever cared about this way, war had taken away everyone she loved.she was faced with adversity when she found out Rasheed got her
When Jalil married Mariam to Rasheed, Mariam thought she deserved that. She was raised in a toxic environment and thought that she didn’t deserve true love. On the other hand, Laila has a very driven personality and believes you need to get what you want. When Tariq showed up when Laila was married to Rasheed, she was determined to become close to Tariq again because she knew she loved
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is a beautiful tale of two women in Afghanistan during the Taliban uprising. They grow up on complete opposite sides of Afghan culture. The main character, Mariam, grows up in a more traditional way caused by her forced marriage to Rasheed. Laila on the other hand, grows up with a supportive father who encourages gender equality and education. There are many cultural differences such as, women’s rights, public executions, and the Taliban. The two main characters, Mariam and Laila, develop greatly throughout the novel. They push each other to be better and to stand up for equality. This plays into the themes of the novel. Women’s strength and loyalty are the two most important themes. They
“Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not, Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not. If a flood should arrive, to drown all that’s alive, Noah is your guide in the typhoon’s eye, grieve not (Hosseini 365).” A Thousand Splendid Suns, written by Khaled Hosseini, is a story that is set place in modern-day Afghanistan. It is one depicting the lives of two particular women who live under the control of a persecuting husband and the infamous rule of the Taliban. And through these two women (Laila and Mariam), Hosseini creates a mind-blowing, awe-inspiring adventure of regret, despair, tragedy, and more importantly, redemption. The book begins with separate perspectives of each woman, and how they consequently come together in the same
Her father’s encouragement teaches Laila to be strong and assert herself, which defies the expectation of being submissive. This can be seen when Laila tells Mariam the reason she defends her against their husband: “I couldn’t let him. I wasn’t raised in a household where people did things like that” (Hosseini 223). Instead of conforming to the expectations of being submissive, Laila chooses to defend her loved ones because of her upbringing: “Laila, having been raised with a strong sense of self by her father, is not as willing to submit to her circumstances” (Stuhr, n.p.). Laila does not bow down to Rasheed as is expected of her.
Explosions, Death, Loss, Fear- all are great symbols for war in A Thousand Splendid Suns. In this novel, Khaled Hosseini uses tumultuous environments to bring up some of the most interesting characters in the 21st century. The three strongest examples are Laila, Tariq, and Aziza. From losing your parents, to losing your leg, Hosseini uses these types of characters to almost make a connection with them. Because we see weakness in them it truly makes their triumph that much greater. War is a raging bull charging through the lives of many, but for some, it makes them stronger.
In the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, main character Mariam is forced into exile after a horrific set of experiences. After her mother’s suicide, she is removed from her home and is later arranged to marry a random man she never met before. Before her departure, Mariam lived in a “kolba,” a small hut on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan. With no other place to go, she disapprovingly lives with her father for a short period of time before being shipped off to her new husband. Her encounter with exile is almost unbearable, yet she endures and grows into a hardworking and respectable woman. For Mariam, exile is both alienating and enriching; it illuminates how withstanding life’s challenges and learning to overcome them with love will ultimately be beneficial in the end, no matter what happens.
Laila and her friendship with Giti and Hasina made her was she is. “By the time we’re twenty... Giti and I, we’ll have pushed out four, five kids. But you, Laila, you’ll make us two dummies proud. You’re going to be somebody.
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, follows the lives of two young Afghanistan women and how their lives intertwine with each other. The book starts following the life of Mariam growing up in a little city called Herat. Mariam lives with her Nana on the outskirts of the city because Mariam was born out of wedlock. Jalil is Mariam’s father who is one of the richest people in Herat and though Mariam believes that Jalil loves her as though she was one of his other daughters but her mother keeps trying to tell her the truth, which is she is just a disgrace Jalil wishes he could make disappear. On Mariam’s fifteenth birthday she wants her father to take her to his cinema to see the movie Pinocchio.
Mariam’s alienation prompted by her mother, father, and husband, in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, reveals the oppression and shame around being a woman in the society of her native Afghanistan. Mariam’s countless, inescapable struggles throughout her life were all regulated by the systematic dehumanization of women in a patriarchal society, which resulted in her living in constant shame and fear. Starting from her birth, she was seen as a bastard because she was conceived out of wedlock, from both her parents, Jalil and Nana, and her society. In her childhood, Mariam is marginalized, by living in a cottage far off from the public eye, because of her father’s fear of humiliation and her mother’s fear of Mariam experiencing the
Hosseini's use of imagery in A Thousand Splendid Suns gives the reader a clear picture of the abuse that Mariam and Laila have experience
The authors Khaled Hosseini and Kurt Vonnegut write novels of critical acclaim. Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns explores the life of Mariam and her struggles with her husband and society, however, she finds reason to fight through a religious tutor. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five examines the life of Billy Pilgrim who goes through the bombing of Dresden and is kidnapped by an alien species, the Tralfamadorians, who have him apply a new philosophy. Using traditional techniques, Hosseini constructs Mullah Faizullah, the religious tutor, as a wise mentor. The persona of a hermit guru was used by Vonnegut as a non-traditional guide in the form of the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five. Hosseini uses foreshadowing and a comforting