91 pages • 3 hours read
Khaled HosseiniThe Kite Runner
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Betrayal and Irony
A strong streak of betrayal runs throughout The Kite Runner. Because Hassan is presented as a profoundly good person, it is unexpected that he will be hurt—much less killed—before Amir can make amends. This subversion of expectations by way of betrayal is foreshadowed early on, when Rahim Khan tells Amir in a letter that good stories have irony. This letter comes after Amir has written his first short story, the tale of a man who kills his wife to draw pearls from his tears. The irony at work in Amir’s short story is the same irony at work in his real-world betrayal of Hassan, which correlates directly to Baba’s own secret betrayal of Ali a decade earlier.
In The Kite Runner, irony is used to imply fate at work or predeterminism—
unending cycles that bring characters full circle. These characters often face recreations of their hidden betrayals or ironic rearrangements of them. When Amir betrays Hassan, avoiding a physical confrontation with Assef, he is forced by extenuating circumstances to meet a grown Assef in combat years later. When Baba betrays Ali by sleeping with Sanaubar, he sets events in motion that cascade and refract forward throughout the lives of both his children. Even as Baba punishes himself for his inability to care for Hassan the way he feels he should, he feeds Amir’s growing feelings of isolation and neglect, making Amir’s betrayal of Hassan almost inevitable. This shame pushes both Amir and Ali still further away. Baba’s original sin is, furthermore, a direct contradiction of the advice he gives to Amir in the narrative’s early chapters when he says, “Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft” (16). After learning the scope of his father’s lie, Amir reflects that he and Hassan were, according to Baba’s philosophy, robbed of one another. In this sense, betrayal, and irony, lay the foundation for the narrative’s dramatic action.
Redemption and Return
Hand in hand with the theme of betrayal are the themes of redemption and return. When Amir first receives Rahim Khan’s call, Rahim tells Amir that he is offering a chance at redeeming himself for the events in Kabul—“[…] a way to be good again” (2). Amir’s return to Afghanistan is mirrored in the narrative by Hassan’s mother, Sanaubar, who leaves Kabul only a week after Hassan’s birth. When she returns, she is an old woman, and her beautiful face—which is said to have “tempted countless men into sin” (7)—has been cut so deeply that she loses sight in one of her eyes. After Sanaubar recovers, she helps to raise and care for her grandson. Rahim Khan suggests that Sohrab would have been too young to remember her, but Sohrab later pines for her: “I want Father and Mother jan. I want Sasa” (309).
Central to Sanaubar’s redemption arc, as well as Amir’s, is Rahim Khan, who is also marked with a scar across his forehead, where he was beaten by a Taliban for cheering too loudly during a soccer match: “He pointed to a scar above his right eye cutting a crooked path through his bushy eyebrow” (173). Although Rahim Khan’s fate is left unresolved, we know that he was complicit in keeping Hassan’s true lineage a secret. If not for Rahim Khan’s various unifying acts, Sanaubar’s return might not have brought her back into her son’s life. Amir may never have had a chance at redemption.
Amir earns his redemptive scarring after the damage to his face is mended by a plastic surgeon following his harrowing battle with Assef. The beating he sustains acts as a debt Amir must pay before he can be fully redeemed, receiving a scar on his upper lip that mimics Hassan’s harelip. Although, like Baba, Amir is too late to make amends directly to Hassan, he can ensure Sohrab, Hassan’s only son, has a chance at a life that Hassan never did. When Amir runs the kite for Sohrab in The Kite Runner’s final pages, Hosseini suggests that redemption is only truly attained through being of service to others.
Spiritual Awakening
An integral part of Amir’s redemption is his spiritual awakening. At various points, the narrative concerns itself with characters, both wicked and good, who are seeking spiritual enlightenment. In the narrative’s climax, Assef considers himself elected by God to lead an ethnic cleansing to restore Afghanistan. Early on, Baba warns Amir of these false prophets, saying, “They do nothing but thumb their prayer beads and recite a book written in a tongue they don’t even understand” (15). Religion is not villainized. Ali, who stands among Amir and Hassan’s most pious influences, is characterized by his humility and goodness. In The Kite Runner, Amir’s growth as a character is dependent on his navigating these contradictory approaches to spirituality.
For much of his life, Amir is distanced from his faith. After witnessing Hassan’s rape, he likens an important religious tradition, the slaughter of the lamb at Eid al-Adha, with his own guilt and trauma. However, Amir often finds himself at a mosque at critical junctures or moments of crisis. When Sohrab goes missing in Islamabad, Amir finds him in the parking lot of a nearby mosque. Outside the mosque where Baba’s funeral service is held, Amir realizes that he must forge his own identity outside of Baba’s shadow. Furthermore, whenever Amir is faced with great fear—when Baba is threatened at gunpoint by the Russian soldier who stops them on their pilgrimage out of Kabul, or when Sohrab is in critical condition after cutting his wrists—Amir repeatedly turns to his faith and prays.
Throughout the novel, a strong emphasis is placed on Amir’s dreams. When Amir slips in and out of consciousness during his hospital stay immediately following his fight with Assef, Amir meets a nurse who tells him her name is Aisha, “like the prophet’s wife” (357). Aisha is referring to the prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam, whose youngest wife was known to be his most beloved and in whose arms he chose to die. It is fitting that when Amir does return to his faith and prayer, he is in a hospital again, asking another nurse which direction west is. When a policeman tells him, Amir spreads a bed sheet and prays for Sohrab: “I feel the eyes of everyone in this corridor on me and still I bow to the west. I pray. I pray that my sins have not caught up with me the way I’d always feared they would” (302). In some sense, Amir has been searching for the way west his entire life.
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