The Kite Runner Quote Analysis

Throughout the whole book, Amir has been vying for love from his father, often against Hassan, and feels powerless when he does not get it; this causes him to attempt to assert power in other aspects of his life, usually over Hassan. Amir feels as if Baba does not love him, and feels powerless to fix it; he says, “I always felt like Baba hated me a little, And why not? After all, I had killed his beloved wife, his beautiful princess, hadn’t I? The least I could have done was to have the decency to have turned out a little more like him. But I hadn’t turned out like him. Not at all” (Hosseini 19). He believes there is nothing he can do to make his father love him; after all, he cannot change the past, and he cannot change himself substantially. This feeling of powerlessness affects him in such a way that he feels the need to compensate for this loss of power elsewhere in his life. He would exploit the kindness and forgiveness Hassan always showed him, and would try and prove his superiority and worth in that relationship. Amir once asked if Hassan would eat dirt if he asked him to, and afterwards said, “I knew I was being cruel, like when I’d taunt him if he didn’t know some big word. But there was something fascinating--albeit in a sick way--about teasing Hassan. Kind of like when we used to play insect torture. Except now he was the ant and I was holding the magnifying glass,” (Hosseini 54). Amir is filling the power gap he feels in his life with power over Hassan, and is trying to show Hassan how much control he has over him. Hassan, Amir’s servant and a genuinely kind person, is in a vulnerable position against Amir,

Amir cannot stand to look at Hassan and seeing the lamb-like eyes, so to make himself feel better about the situation, he frames Hassan. Amir is upset that Baba forgives Hassan but it is ironic because he is the one doing the sinful act and yet again it is Hassan who is saving and protecting Amir. These unfaithful acts are not in fact an act of selflessness but and an act of selfishness. Everything Amir is doing is for himself. He only cares about his own feelings but never is he putting himself in others people’s

In Amir's desperate attempt to get out from under feelings of crushing guilt, he planted his birthday present of a watch and some money under Hassan's mattress and told Baba. "I knocked on Baba's door and told what I hoped would be the last in a long line of shameful lies." (pg.104) But when Hassan replied "yes" to stealing, Amir "flinched, like I'd been slapped. My heart sank and I almost blurted out the truth. Then I understood: This was Hassan's final sacrifice for me." (pg. 105) Amir said he loved Hassan in that moment, more than he ever loved anyone but he didn't tell the truth. He remained silent hoping that the stealing would get them fired and he could "move on, forget, start with a clean slate...be able to breathe again." (pg. 106) However, Baba forgave Hassan for stealing, to Amir's complete shock, but Ali insisted they leave anyway and that broke Baba's heart.

In Runner, Robert Newton conveys that Charlie the protagonist is bound to mature early to make completely selfless choices. When his father dies, Charlie is contrived to fill his father’s boots, meaning he had to take up his father’s role of being the financial provider of his family. Additionally, Charlie makes an altruistic choice by running for squizzy Taylor. Lastly, Charlie makes the self-sacrificing decision by gambling his large saving from Squizzy on the Ballarat Mile. In summary, Newton demonstrates that Charlie is forced into adulthood early through necessity and make self-denying decisions due to his family's desperate circumstances.

The love and disputes between father and son. The relationship that Amir has with Baba is quite complicated. Amir constantly tries to earn Baba’s love and respect while Baba has a hard time accepting how Amir is and compares him to Hassan. While travelling to Pakistan in the back of the truck Amir felt sick quite often by which Baba was quite annoyed. “I saw it on his embarrassed face the couple of times my stomach had clenched so badly I had moaned. When the blurly guy with the beads-the praying woman’s husband-asked if I was going to get sick, I said I might. Baba looked away.”In addition to this when Amir throws up, Baba apologizes to the fellow passengers to which Amir feels guilty and annoyed that he is just 18 and the way Baba is behaving is as if car sickness is a crime. This suggests that Baba was expecting Amir to be more self controlled and strong so that he didn’t feel sick showing us the conflicts he has with Amir as he expects a lot from him.

The quote, “Guilt is a destructive and ultimately pointless emotion” (Crilly, 2012), shows the effect of guilt on a person. Guilt can control a whole person’s life at times, and constantly causes them to think about events that caused the emotion. Two characters in The Kite Runner, Amir and Baba, constantly experience guilt due to important events that occured in their lives. In The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, the motif of guilt is shown when looking at how Amir lived with the death of his mother, how Amir responded to the attack of Hassan, and how Baba dealt with being the biological father of Hassan.

As a child, Amir constantly wants to impress Baba because he shows so little interest in him. Before the kite-fighting tournament, Baba tells Amir to win, which puts “a seed in my head...I was going to win. There was no other viable option.... Then maybe my life as a ghost in this house would finally be over”(Hosseini 56). Here, Baba has put at stake all Amir’s hopes of affection on winning the tournament. After Assef rapes Hassan, Amir decides that “Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba.” (77). Instead of stopping Assef from raping Hassan, he lets it happen so afterwards he can get the kite and earn Baba’s respect. This would not have happened if Baba had not pinned all Amir’s hopes for his affection on winning the tournament. Therefore, Baba is a bad father because by not showing affection to Amir, he caused Amir to have misguided morals.

The first sentence of the quote foreshadows Amir’s struggle to forget the past throughout the rest of the book. He claims that no matter how hard you try or how far you bury it, the past will always “claw its way out”. Also in this sentence, Amir implies an occurrence of a tragic event without actually telling the readers what it was. In the last sentence Amir speaks of peering into an alley later revealed as the alley where his childhood friend, Hassan, was raped. By saying this he is telling the readers that the alley and the events that occurred in the alley are constantly on his mind and have been on his mind for the past twenty-six years. The fact that it has been twenty-six years also verifies the importance of the event.

Amir killed his own beloved mother that use to be Baba’s wife and Ali’s mother. The only way to be forgiven is to get the blue kite from Hassan, who was in the state of being raped. It seems like Hassan is the price to get Baba’s love. Baba’s only concern is that Amir would grow up as a man who couldn’t stand up for what is right. The choice that he made was to flee which was a complete opposite of what Baba wanted. If Amir had stood up for Hassan but lose the kite, Amir would still earn Baba’s love. Proving to him that he has confidence in

I have incorporated important phrases and visuals onto the chair that fit the theme of the book. Starting from the top of the chair I have the quote, “There is a way to be good again.”(pg.2) On the back of that piece I have another quote saying “Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay. The lamb I had to slay in order to win over Baba.”(pg.82) I put these quotes because they tie each other together well. Amir chose Baba's love over his friendship with Hassan which eventually lead him to be placed into the situation where he chooses to redeem himself. Below this, I have the word redemption because it is the theme of the novel. I painted the quote, “For you, a thousand times over.”(pg.391) on the strip of wood because when Amir said this quote

But if so, then why, when Baba's friends came to visit with their kids, didn't I ever include Hassan in our games? Why did I play with Hassan only when no one else was around?” (Hosseini 33). When Assef tells Amir that his friendship with Hassan bothers him, Amir hastily thinks of Hassan as nothing but a servant.

The fact that Amir does not stack up to Hassan in the eyes of their father becomes clear during a conversation that he overhears between Baba and Rahim Khan. Not only does his father not understand his inclination to spend his days reading and writing, he also looks down upon Amir’s inability to stand up both for his own self and for others and tendency to let Hassan fight his battles for him. He states unequivocally that “A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything” (22). This leads to Amir’s heightened jealousy of Hassan, general feeling of inadequacy, and an

Furthermore, Amir forgives Baba for not telling him that Amir and Hassan are half-brothers. Hassan gets treated very well by Baba, considering he is a server at Baba’s house. Hassan gets great birthday presents, and he is always welcome to father-son activities with Amir and Baba. Sometimes Amir is jealous and doesn’t understand why Hassan gets treated the same as himself. Amir wants to be treated better, because he is Baba’s son, and Hassan is Baba’s servant. What Amir doesn’t know is that Hassan is his half-brother. Years later, Rahim Kahn tells him this when Amir visits him in Pakistan. Amir learns that a long time ago, Baba had an affair with a Hazara woman, which was socially unacceptable. Out of this affair, a child was born: Hassan. Hassan is not Ali’s son; Hassan is Baba’s son. Baba never tells Amir, and this makes Amir very angry and disappointed. For Amir, his father is a hero and not a liar. However, when Rahim Kahn explains Baba’s situation and why he acted this way, Amir starts to

As a young child, Amir blamed himself for his mother’s death during his birth, striving to win his father’s acceptance. However, this proved to be difficult because his father’s servant’s son, Hassan,

During the events of The Kite Runner the characters are faced with many unfortunate realities. Although the main characters Amir and Hassan are forced to deal with traumatic events throughout the story, they believe the saying “Better to get hurt by the truth, than comforted with a lie” (Hosseini, ch. 6). The quote is an important one because it can be applied in many contexts, including my own life and be universally accepted that it hurts more when you are lied to rather than being told the truth.