Spoiler alert :)
Major themes of the book;
Guilt
A major theme in this book is guilt. Amir is haunted the majority of his life because of the guilt he felt towards his friend Hassan. Not stepping in when Hassan got raped and needed his help.
Redemption
Amir tries to get rid of his guilt and his cowardly behaviour by adopting Hassan’s son Sohrab. This takes a lot of fighting and patience, but Amir is determined to proceed the adoption because for the first time in his life he feels like he is not letting people down.
Male role model and family relationships
The book is called “The kite runner” because kites play a big part in Amir’s life. Amir feels (even as a child) the distance between he and his father and winning the kite competition is the very first time that Amir feels appreciated and loved by his father. To him kites mean bonding and so he believes that running kites will bring Sohrab and him together again, after Sohrab lost all faith.
Discrimination and division
Hassan is a Hazara, a group of people from a lower social class. Amir is actually brought up to treat all people the same, but he does feel like a better person than Hassan when they were younger. Hassan is also being discriminated by all the town’s children because of his ancestry.
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Core
The Kite Runner opens in 2001. It is about a man from Afghanistan looking back on his life. As it is said in the book he thought about the life he had lived before the particular event which changed his life. Amir lives in Afghanistan with his father and two servants. His mother died giving birth to him. It is the early sixties and things are still peaceful in Afghanistan. Amir is a quiet boy, keeping to himself; loves to read books. The only friend he has is the servant’s only son named Hassan. Life seems to be treating him well but Amir has his worries. He has to fight to win his father’s recognition, feels like he cannot do anything right in his father’s eyes and this breaks Amir’s heart. When they actually have plans to do things together, father always wants to bring Hassan with them. Amir gets really jealous by that because he feels that his father is blaming him for his mother’s death. When Hassan and Amir hang out together I could also feel that there was gap between the young boys. Amir talks in a really condescending way to Hassan, which makes him feel better about himself. He loves to show Hassan how much cleverer he is. On the other hand he yearns for Hassan as a true friend
This all changes when Amir wins a kite runner competition. His father is cheering for him and Amir has never felt happier in his life. He gives the kite he won to Hassan to bring it home, but on his way Hassan stumbles upon Assef, the town’s bully. Amir follows Hassan but is too afraid to back him up. Things go terribly out of hand and Assef rapes Hassan. However, Hassan never blames Amir for not helping him but Amir starts to hate Hassan for not hating him. And so they get tangled in a very complex situation. Amir cannot stand hanging out with Hassan anymore. He hates himself for having those feelings towards Hassan but he cannot help himself. Hassan and his father Ahmad cannot deal with the situation anymore and decide to move out. Amir father is unaware of the whole situation, begs them to stay and they already made up their minds. Baba is devastated and cherishes the memories of Ahmad and Hassan throughout his life.
Then the Russians invade Afghanistan. Amir and his father decide to flee to America. However, Amir’s father could never call America his home. They both get jobs Amir gets married to a beautiful Afghan girl and on top of that Baba dies. Being settled with his wife, Amir starts to think about his life in Afghanistan. About Hassan especially. Then he gets a phone call from an old friend asking him to come to Afghanistan. Afghanistan is no longer the country as he remembered from his childhood. The Taliban are taking over the entire country; everything ruined; people being killed on a daily basis.
Amir meets this friend and is shocked by the story he tells Amir. Seemingly Hassan was Baba’s secret son, making him Amir Half-brother. Hassan and his wife both got killed by the Talibs but their son Sohrab survived. He tells Amir that Sohrab was taken to an orphanage. When Amir arrived at the orphanage, it turns out that the Talibs took the little boy. After a long search he finds Sohrab and Amir meets his childhood enemy Assef. Assef became a head of the Talibs and holds Sohrab imprisoned. He makes Sohrab dance to music and wear make-up.
Eventually Amir succeeds in taking Sohrab home after a long fight with the adoption bureaus, but Sohrab tries to kill himself. He survives and Amir takes him home to America. Then a year later Amir and Sohrab participate in a kite runner competition, Sohrab smiles for the very first time.
Position in Era
When Amir was still a young boy and living in Afghanistan, the country was a peaceful place to grow up in. Twenty years later trouble started. The Russians invaded. Their life in America was relatively worry-free. Returning to Afghanistan after all those years gave Amir a shock. Afghanistan had transformed into a waste land ruled by monsters. There was nothing left of the country he once loved. People lived in fear now and for good reason. The Talibs killed everyone that crossed their path.
Comment – reading experience - with quotations
I did not have any expectations when I started reading this book and I never thought that I would love the book this much! It is not so much the themes that appealed to me but the way Hosseini portrays everything in the book. In my opinion Hosseini is a true storyteller, touching me again and again. They way he describes situation, characters and emotion is emotionally, almost in a feminine way
“He lowered his voice, but I heard him anyway: “If I hadn’t seen the doctor pull him out of my wife with my own eyes, I’d never believe he’s my son.” (p. 22)
I cannot even believe how traumatising it is for a child when he hears his father say something like that to a friend. Amir was aware of how the relationship between he and his father was, even when it was unspoken, but when he could hear it actually coming from his own father’s mouth, their relationship hits rock bottom. And not until Amir is in his thirties, those ties get a little bit connected again.
“The curious thing was, I never thought of Hassan and me as friends either. Not in the usual sense anyhow. Never mind that we taught each other to ride a bicycle with no hands, or to build a fully functioning homemade camera out of a cardboard box. Never mind that we spent entire winters flying kites, running kites. Never mind that to me, the face of an Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned face, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile.
Never mind those things. Because history isn’t easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi’a, and nothing was ever going to change that.” (p. 24)
A beautifully written passage about the division between two people with a different ancestry. It describes the gap between them and why they never could be that close. As he says: history isn’t easy to overcome, it should never be a valid reason why people cannot get close to each other. This is how it is and it has always been that way. They simply resign themselves to the fact that it will always be that way. That is how Afghan (and similar cultures) often works. Have respect for your history, family and culture and obey it.
“But mostly because, as the streets froze and the ice sheathed the roads, the chill between Baba and me thawed a little. And the reason for that were the kites. Baba and I lived in the same house, but in different spheres of existence. Kites were the one paper-thin slice on intersection between those spheres.” (p. 46)
“We’d go to the zoo to see Marjan the lion, and maybe Baba wouldn’t yawn and steal looks at his wristwatch all the time. Maybe Baba would read one of my stories. I’d write him a hundred if I thought he’d read one. Maybe he’d call me Amir jan like Rahim Khan did. And maybe, just maybe, I would finally be pardoned for killing my mother.” (p. 53)
Although they live in the same house, they are miles apart from each other emotionally. They do not feel connected at all. Another reason why he loved the kites was that his father treated him as a son. He craved for his father’s recognition and he felt that Hassan was just in the way. It felt like a competition to him for his father’s love.
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