Outline of the Story
Kite Runner(2003) by Khaled Hosseini often reads like a fable, a parable of love, friendship, and above all redemption. Though it would be naive to limit the novel and its themes to just these three facets, Kite Runner is a lot more. The history of a troubled and savaged nation is told in miniature. The rise of an extremist group that would take control over the war torn and rugged land and above all a poignant tale of love, friendship, loss, and filial relationship.
Characters:
The main protagonist is Amir. His father is a successful businessman in Kabul and quite wealthy. Amir, however as a little boy is insecure since nothing that he does is good enough in the eyes of his father. His father wanted him to be a soccer player whereas Amir was more into writing and kite flying. It is through his eyes and life that Afganisthan is drawn to us. It is his friendship and search for atonement that form the pivot of the novel.
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Hassan: Amir’s best friend and also the son of Ali, their servant. Hassan is of lower strata of society and is also disfigured with a cleft lip. However, he loves Amir devotedly and often comes to his help. He even protects Amir from the local bullies. Strangely, Hassan is everything that Amir’s father wanted in Amir. This led Amir to be sometimes envious of Hassan. However, it is their winning of the kite flying tournament that forms one of the memorable instances of the novel. Hassan is the best kite runner. Indeed it is him on which the book has been titled.
Rahim Khan is Amir’s father’s business associate as well as a close friend. It is he who shields and often shelters Amir from his over-critical father. It is also him, who advises him to come over from America to save Sohrab, Hassan’s son from the twisted orphanage.
Assef is the proverbial villain. He was the bully of Amir’s childhood and also the person who led the sexual assault on Hassan. Later when Amir comes back to Taliban ruled Kabul, he finds that it is Assef who is one of the Taliban leaders and it is he who has bought Sohrab for his salacious sexual appetite. He is the very incarnation of evil and quite easily lives up to the popular impression of the Taliban around the world.
Setting:
The novel at one level is also an autobiography of Hosseini, who himself was born in Kabul and was forced to relocate to the USA after the USSR invaded Afghanistan hence disabling his family’s return from Paris, where his father was stationed in the embassy. Despite living outside Afghanistan and Kabul for most of his life, he spent his childhood to eleven years of age there. The novel too starts with Amir in his childhood. Khaled has been working to provide humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan through The Khaled Hosseini Foundation [1] hence suggesting that Afghanistan holds more than mere sentimental and nostalgic interest for Hosseini. Through Kite Runner, he perhaps attempts not only to re-familiarise himself with his land of birth but also presents a contrasting picture of it to the West, where currently Afghanistan symbolizes all that threatens their national security. Through his depiction, we get the Afganisthan and Kabul of old but scarcely known, where Michael Jackson, Hollywood, alcohol and of course, kite flying, were quite popular. Afghanistan wasn’t as divorced from the West as it later became, first from the Soviet invasion and later by the Taliban rule. The escape from Afghanistan that Amir and their father make is symptomatic of an entire generation of Afganis who fled their country after the Soviet invasion. Many sought refuge in Pakistan and others more well-off in the US. Hence a deep and tragic history underlines Kite Runner, a history of a country and its people, ravaged perhaps beyond salvage by war and extremists.
Theme and Plot:
At the center of the novel lies a beautiful and sensitive story of friendship and love. The friendship of Amir and Hassan, son of the servant of his house, is most vividly and exquisitely rendered. The moments of their time together, the kite flying and running are etched with such artistry and feeling that it becomes unforgettable. It is simple yet endearing, short yet everlasting. Such is the magnitude of the beautiful relationship called friendship penned by Hosseini in Kite Runner. Furthermore what makes this friendship eternal and this novel so grand in its depiction of the most cherished human sentiments is the search for redemption or absolution by Amir. Their friendship sadly ended due to a childish error and cowardice on the part of Amir forcing Hassan and his father to leave Amir’s household. Almost more than two decades later when Amir is married and successful as a novelist in the US, he receives a call from an ailing Rahim Khan, his father’s close friend. He asks Amir to come to Afghanistan, he enigmatically tells Amir that “there is a way to be good again.” Still haunted by his betrayal and cowardice and not knowing of what had become of his best friend Hassan, he decides to go. Thus begins the final leg of Amir’s journey, the journey of atonement and finding a lost friendship. The closing chapters where Amir tries to find Sohrab, the late Hassan’s son, provide a disturbing and gruesome representation of Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. These sections however have been controversial and have been questioned regarding their veracity. “The Kite Runner has been accused of hindering Western understanding of the Taliban by portraying Taliban members as representatives of various alleged Western myths of evil ( for example, Assef’s pedophilia, Nazism, drug abuse, and sadism, and the fact that he is an executioner). The American Library Association reports that The Kite Runner is one of its most-challenged books of 2008, with multiple attempts to remove it from libraries due to “offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group. Afghanistan’s Ministry of Culture banned the film from distribution in cinemas or DVD stores, citing the possibility that the movie’s ethnically charged rape scene could incite racial violence within Afghanistan.” [2] Despite this, these sections are perhaps the most riveting and gripping sections of the book and are also critical to the saga of Amir.
Analysis and evaluation of text
The Kite Runner is a simple, straight-to-heart kind of story. It does not involve complicated relationships or psychological explorations. However, it does paint a wonderful almost poetic picture of friendship. What I find most fascinating about the text is the Afganisthan that perhaps few are aware of. The common perception is that it is a lawless land of tribal warlords, forever being the center of expansion and colonial plans by stronger nations, the origin of the Taliban and personalities like Osama Bin Laden but Hosseini shows that it wasn’t so always. Its capital Kabul was an urban modern city like any other place in the world till the Soviets decided something else for the land. The story is dramatic, almost Bollywoodish in its depiction of friendship lost and the quest to retrieve it. Here, I do not use the term ‘Bollywoodish’ in a derogatory sense but in a sense where I mean to imply that it appeals to me like one of the old masala yarns in the “Yaadon Ki Baarat” mold. I also find the depiction of the life of refugees in the US quite interesting and how they have carved out their homelands and cultures in their new foreign homes amuses. Certainly, the crowning glory of the text is Hassan and his friendship. Despite him being only present till the first quarter of the text, Hassan the kite runner remains with us long after the close of the text. “For you, a thousand times over.”, echoes throughout the text since the moment Hassan first utters it in testament to his eternal friendship.
Strangely the tale echoes and resembles Pather Panchali, the Bengali classic made eternal by Satyajit Ray. This novel too tells the tale of the journey of a boy from his home or roots to a country far beyond and different from where he grew up. It tells the story of Amir, like Apu, who grows up and faces the changing world around him. A journey from tradition to modernity here is symbolized by Afganisthan and America respectively. Here too Amir becomes a writer just like Apu in the Apu trilogy of Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay. However, Kite Runner depicts a much harsher reality, a much more horrifying state of things where war, rape, bloodshed, etc resonate viciously in the pages.
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