Analysis Of The Kite Runner By Dr Khaled Hosseini

Good evening ladies and gentlemen,

Each year the “Man Booker Prize for Fiction” is awarded for the best original novel written in the English language. This literary award of excellence is awarded to an individual who has enriched our literary culture. It gives me great pleasure tonight in presenting the 2016 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, to Dr Khaled Hosseini for his exceptional novel, “The Kite Runner”!

The Kite Runner, even though a fictional novel, draws on parts of its author’s own past. Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul Afghanistan in 1965. His father was a diplomat and his mother taught history at a private girls’ school in the city. Due to the nature of his father’s occupation, the family moved around continuously and in 1976 they

His narrative technique consists of combining different time zones, turning around the important incidents and events. The novel opens with “I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.” For Amir, the past is always with him, from the book’s first sentence. During the majority of the novel, Amir attempts to deal with his guilt by ignoring it. Amir defines himself by his past. But doing this clearly does nothing toward redeeming himself, and thus his guilt endures as reflected by him flinching every time Hassan’s name is mentioned. Amir feels responsible for every dreadful event in Hassan’s life due to him pushing Hassan out of Baba’s house as a result of guilt. Hassan’s rape is the source of Amir’s guilt, which motivates his search for redemption. Amir is riddled with guilt for not helping his friend “the way he’d stood up for Amir [me] all those times in the past.” Amir’s inaction is symbolic of the West’s inaction as Afghanistan was torn apart by foreign occupation and war. It takes him half a lifetime to atone

I found the novel quite overwhelming and thought-provoking as I could not predict what would happen next. The suspense Hosseini created drew me into Hosseini’s complex descriptive relationships, and enabled me to identify with the characters making them more real and human as he demonstrated their flaws and shortcomings. This book took me on an unbelievable emotional roller-coaster from shedding tears of sorrow when faced with the cruelty of human kind, to the heart-warming moments bringing tears of joy. “The Kite Runner” will always be a book I consider to be a gem that has changed me as a