Belief In The Kite Runner

A conviction is a firmly held belief that someone has about something. In The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini bases many events off of convictions he has. Hosseini upholds these convictions through character actions. A big conviction he has is if a person denies love someone else, they will stop at nothing to get it back. Amir, Hassan, and Sohrab all either experience this or are denying someone that love.

Three times Amir goes to great lengths to get Baba’s love. First, Amir doesn’t intervene when Hassan is getting raped because he doesn’t want to ruin the glory he will receive from Baba. He wants the approval and love of his father so bad that he validates what he did by saying “he was just a Hazara” (Hosseini 77). Amir is so infatuated with

If I were to interview one of the authors from the paper Love Deprivation, Wechsler Performance> Verbal Discrepancy, and Violent Delinquency, PhD Anthony Walsh would relate this character activity to the need for love and acceptance. Walsh and his colleagues link those two needs to violence. In The Kite Runner you are introduced to a sociopath Assef who ultimately enjoys inflicting pain on others. The study done is able to give a light into Assef’s actions throughout the book. When you meet Assef’s parents, it is apparent that they aren’t showering him with love. When the family walks into Amirs birthday party they walked in “like he was the parent, and they were his children” (Hosseini 95). Halfway through the conversation with Assef and his parents, Amir wonders if “on some level, their son frightened them” (Hosseini 96). These two points in the novel lead people to believe that assef’s parents are not giving him adequate love, therefore, accounting for his violent behavior. Walsh would say that Assef’s actions are explainable by this experiment. The results they found proved that a lack of love “has a stronger impact on violent delinquency than any other variable” (Walsh, Beyer, Petee 181). Throughout the book Assef sociopathic actions are seen like his lack of guilt and violent behavior. Walsh found that psychopaths, who share many of the same characteristics as sociopaths, “have low hemisphere arousal” and aggressiveness relates to “left-hemisphere inferiority relative to right-hemisphere capacity” (Walsh, Beyer, Petee 179). Therefore, another reason accounting for Assef’s sociopathic actions once again linking to the unliamte cause of love