A moment in someone’s life can define who they are for the rest of it; sometimes it is a bad moment that leads them to seek redemption for the rest of their life. Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is a dramatic novel that describes the life of a man named Amir, who lets his half-brother, Hassan, get raped and does nothing. This moment defines Amir’s life; eventually, after his guilt builds up, Amir gets Hassan and his father Ali to leave his house, and then Amir moves to America. In America, he lives a normal life and gets married, until one day when his father’s friend Rahim Khan asks him to save Hassan’s son Sohrab from an orphanage in Afghanistan. Eventually, Amir decides he must go save Sohrab, and when he does he figures out there was …show more content…
Amir begins to pray and says: ”I will fast during Ramadan and when Ramadan has passed I will go on fasting, I will commit to memory every last word of His holy book, and I will set on a pilgrimage to that sweltering city in the desert and bow before Ka’bah too. I will do all of this and I will think of Him and every day from this day on if He only grants me this one wish: My hands are stained with Hassan’s blood; I pray God doesn’t let them get stained with the blood of his boy too.” (346) Amir’s prayer is very interesting because it is for him, and not for Sohrab. This is an extremely selfish thing to do because time and time again Amir puts himself before everyone else. His selfishness has come to the point that he would say, “I pray God doesn’t let [his hands] get stained with the blood of [Sohrab] too,” this comment is showing how Amir’s initial reaction is to worry about his conscience. When Amir is making promises to God, Hosseini uses hyperbole, which is the over exaggeration of words or phrases. Hosseini uses hyperbole to make the point that Amir is in a desperate state, and that in his desperation he is making false promises to God. For example, Amir says, “I will commit to memory every last word of His holy book,” even though his promises were said in the hope of Sohrab being ok; they were said so that Amir wouldn’t have to feel guilt. Amir’s selfishness and false promises foil the intent of his prayers; this keeps him from
Hosseini shows that it is Amirs immense guilt that drives him to want to make things right and to earn redemption. We learn the basis Amir's guilt through his memories. It is caused by a lack of response at a time when his loyal servant and close friend Hassan is in trouble. Amir makes a conscious decision to hide in the distance and just watch, not because he was afraid. He sacrifices Hassan in order to earn his fathers attention and affection. This decision results in Hassan suffering though a traumatic experience and is the root of Amir's lasting regret.
In the novel The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini tells a notable coming-of-age story portraying the actions and thoughts of Amir, a penitent adult living in the United States and his reminiscence of his affluent childhood in the unstable political environment of Afghanistan. Throughout the novel Khaled Hosseini uses character description to display his thoughts on sin and redemption.
The Kite runner is the first novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, published in 2003 by Riverhead Books . It takes place before Afghanistan’s revolution and its invasion by Russian forces. The kite runner is a vivid and engaging story that gives a picture of how long Afghanis struggled to triumph over the forces of violence, forces that threaten them even today. In this novel , four themes have been introduced, first of all Redemption is a way to make up sins committed , secondly, Adversities contribute to a person’s personality , thirdly , Fear can lead to severe mistakes and long term consequences, before last, After pain and struggles come survival and lastly, Friendship is the essence of a bond that seek the best mutually.
In the novel, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, the author takes the reader into the fictional world of Amir and Hassan, two best friends who face the untold realities of their childhood as they struggle to cope with guilt and heartbreaking losses. The story is told from the perspective of Amir, a Pashtun who grows up in a privileged society and lives with his father, Baba and his best friend and Hazara servant, Hassan. One of the major turning points in the story occurs when Amir leaves Hassan to be raped by a bully, ruining their relationship for the rest of his life. While dealing with the guilt of betraying Hassan, who he later learns is his half-brother, Amir learns shocking truths about his father that alter his perspective of Baba
It’s so easy for the reader to hastily judge and draw unfair conclusions about a character in a novel. It’s so easy for the reader to sit back and say to themselves, “He should’ve done this,” or “He should’ve have said that.” In fact, it’s so easy for any person, whether it be real-world or within literature, to gloss over the stress, the intensity, the trauma of being ensnared in a personal dilemma. Amir Khan was 12 years old when he peered down an alleyway from behind a corner wall as his childhood friend, Hassan, was brutally raped. Amir stood there, shaking from fear, and made a decision that would transform the rest of his life. He ran. However, any wise man knows that you cannot out-run your personal dilemmas, and for the rest of the novel, he encountered difficulties. Amir’s past is haunted by his memories and fills his conscious with regret, his experience shatters his childhood innocence and thrusts him into the grim reality of his society, and his soul challenged as he seeks repentance and cleansing. In Khaled Hosseini’s, “The Kite Runner,” Amir’s fateful decision not to act while his friend Hassan was cruelly sexually assaulted serves as a pivotal moment in shaping the greater meaning of the novel as a whole by exploring the topics of regret, loss of innocence, and soul-searching.
Throughout the novel, “The Kite Runner,” by Khaled Hosseini, Amir is haunted by memories of his past. The theme has been, betrayal, loyalty, guilt and honor. The tone throughout is confessional. Amir the main character, is constantly troubled by his memory of Hassan’s rape and believes “he became what [he] is today at the age of 12,” because of his own cowardice at not stopping Hassan from being raped. After Hassan’s rape, Amir spends the rest of his life trying to redeem himself for his betrayal of his loyal friend. The rape leads Amir to his final quest for redemption when he is told “there is a way to be good again.” The climax of “The Kite Runner” is when Amir seeks to rectify the wrong he did to Hassan and finally finds Hassan’s son, Sohrab.
Redemption can come in many different forms for different people. In The Kite Runner, written by Khaled Hosseini, a story of an Afghani man’s lifetime and all of the troubles that he has experienced is told. Amir’s childhood takes place in Kabul, Afghanistan alongside Hassan, his Hazara servant and half-brother. The two grow up as best friends until one day when Amir does nothing to help Hassan out of a life changing incident with the town bully. Their friendship is severely affected for the rest of their lives until Amir meets Sohrab, Hassan’s son. After finding out Hassan has passed away, Amir is sent off to retrieve Sohrab and bring him to a better place than the Taliban-ruled Kabul. The connection between the two new acquaintances is like a new beginning for many aspects in Amir’s life. Sohrab and Amir’s relationship acts as a way for Amir to rid himself of guilt from his childhood and provide his wife with a child, supporting the theme of redemption in The Kite Runner.
“There is a way to be good again” (Khaled Hosseini 2). This quote implies that there is still hope for a better future through the redemption of past sins. Throughout the novel, the main character, Amir, develops deep regret from the actions he has committed in Kabul. He is haunted by this everlasting guilt for years until he gets a call from Rahim Khan whose suggestion of having a better future changes his feelings of remorse and regret. He undergoes this journey of redemption to eventually redeem himself for betraying his best friend and half brother Hassan to become “good again.” In Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, symbolism and diction are used to illustrate the idea that guilt influences the mistakes made by Amir which affects himself, the people around him, and the events that occur afterwards in his life.
This research project is focused on understanding a book, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. In addition, the project objective is to understand choices, actions, and processes of characters and what factors led them to arrive to such consequences.
Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is a remarkable coming-of-age novel describing and revealing the thoughts and actions of Amir, a compunctious adult in the United States and his memories of his affluent childhood in the unstable political environment of Afghanistan. The novel showcases the simplistic yet powerful ability of guilt to influence decisions and cause conflict which arises between Amir’s childhood friend and half-brother, Hassan; Amir’s father, Baba; and importantly, himself. Difference in class The quest to become “good again” causes a reflection in Amir to atone for his sins and transform into the person of which he chooses to be.
Rather than leaving Sohrab, Amir chooses to take Sohrab’s place as the victim. He embraces the role of the lamb; he is the sacrifice needed in order to take Sohrab away from Assef. If Amir fights him and wins, he can leave a free man with Sohrab. Amir doesn’t realize until that moment that his sacrifice, that his potential death for another person, is what he needs to make up for his sins:
As a boy, Hosseini participated in a beloved cultural tradition known as kite fighting, which he reflects as a central focus in The Kite Runner through his protagonist Amir. Hosseini’s memories of Afghanistan deal mostly with “a lot of kite-flying, especially in the months of winter”, something that was important for him to incorporate into his novel ( ).Kite fighting was something Hosseini associated with being Afghan, so upon hearing the news that it was banned, Hosseini was inspired to share a story about his country, with elements of his own childhood tied into it ( 10). What began as a short story between two young boys grew into the renowned book it is today with a touch of Hosseini’s life added to it. In The Kite Runner, Amir struggles
The desire to feel loved and wanted by your parents can drive a person to go to extreme limits to get that love. One boy that goes to these extreme limits is Amir. All Amir wants is to have a good, strong relationship with his father. He feels the death of his mother was his fault, and he needed to make it up to his father. In doing so, Amir let’s horrible things happen to his friend Hassan. Many many years later, after fleeing to America, Amir returns to Afghanistan in search of redemption of his actions all those years ago. The theme of The Kite Runner written by Khaled Hosseini is redemption. Through Amir’s life, that’s what he’s been doing to himself, trying to redeem himself from his acts that have brought pain
When you were a child, do you remember ever making a promise to be loyal to a friend? Maybe you exchanged cute heart necklaces or pendants or carved your names into a tree. In Khaled Hosseini 's The Kite Runner, two kids, Amir, and Hassan seem to have a strong friendship, represented in their names carved into a pomegranate tree. However, Amir reveals weakness in their friendship when he betrays Hassan by not intervening when the town bully, Assef, sexually assaults Hassan. In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol S. Dweck describes two types of mindsets. One is the fixed mindset, which is the belief that a person has a fixed amount of intelligence, and one cannot see growth in error, and a growth mindset, which is the belief that
From generation to generation, the constant struggle for males to live up to the expectations of their fathers often affects the choices made and actions taken by the sons. Perhaps, the overbearing testosterone levels claim responsibility for the apparent need for sons to impress their fathers, but not all boys consider the realistic consequences of their decisions. In Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner, young Amir's admiration for his father Baba, coupled with the constant tension in their relationship obscures his mind from making clear decisions as he strives to obtain his father's love and approval.