Guilt In The Kite Runner

Guilt: A Fatal Path to Walk Along in The Kite Runner

“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime,” (Hosseini 150). This is because each moment has the incredible power to influence who we are and what actions we decide to take in the future. In the novel The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, the main character Amir does experience a life-changing moment: Amir witnesses his childhood best friend Hassan being raped, and, frozen in fear, he fails to intervene. From that moment on, Amir leads an unhappy life where his guilt damages his relationship with Hassan, damages his relationship with his Father, and damages his own health. Amir lives a dismal life filled with poor

decisions, all because of the guilt of his failure to defend Hassan.
The instant Amir turns his back to Hassan, he turns his back on their friendship forever and opens a door to regret and mistakes. The boys, who once had a close relationship -constantly together, playing, causing mischief and having fun- are now never seen together:
I didn’t speak with Hassan until the middle of the next week.

When Hassan asked if I wanted to hike up the hill, I said I was tired. Hassan looked tired too- he’d lost weight and gray circles had formed under his puffed-up eyes. But when he asked again, I reluctantly agreed. We trekked up the hill, our boots squishing in the muddy snow. Neither one of us had said anything. We sat under our pomegranate tree and I knew I’d made a mistake. I shouldn’t have come up the hill. The words I’d carved on the tree trunk with Ali’s kitchen knife, ‘Amir and Hassan: The sultans of Kabul’...I couldn’t stand looking at them now.

(92)
The guilt that Amir held within from failing to save Hassan was so overruling that he would rather hide from Hassan, than have his presence bring back memories and feelings of regret.

Choosing not to speak with Hassan is easier than having to admit his mistake. By avoiding seeing Hassan all together, Amir could enter a false sense state of temporary comfort- free from his moral suffering. Eventually, Amir ventures to rid himself of Hassan, and hopefully the remorse, forever. “Either way, this much had become clear: One of us had to go,” (108) Amir thought to himself on his birthday, after having spent the whole night torn up with too much shame to actually enjoy himself. Making a mistake that would officially terminate their friendship, Amir decides to hide one of his new birthday presents, a watch, under Hassan’s bed and frame him for stealing it. Just as Amir hopes, the discovery of the ‘stolen’ watch makes Hassan move away. This is a good idea in theory, but sending away his best friend is frankly quite desperate and self-destructive, an idea that brings him more loss than hope. What started as a minor mistake is now a series of mistakes as Amir tries to find more ways to erase all memories of Hassan’s rape, even if that means erasing Hassan himself. Later on in the novel, Amir’s efforts to rid himself of his guilt are unsuccessful because, even with Hassan out of his life, the thought of Hassan and the rape still haunts Amir in America: “A pair of steel hands closed

around my windpipe at the sound of Hassan’s name. I rolled down the window [of a car]. Waited for the steel hands to loosen their grip” (141). Despite now living in America, the land of the free, Amir feels trapped by his past. Hassan and Amir made many happy memories as young boys, but because even a slight mention of his homeland reopens old wounds, Amir chooses to ignore the entirety of his childhood in Afghanistan. This is ironic because Amir attempts to avoid the agony of his critical mistake, but as a result, he ends up with more painful loss: The loss of his positive memories. How can one truly be happy when their entire childhood brings up memories tainted with misery and mistakes? Evidently, Amir was not happy. Amir remains troubled by the loss of his friend long into adulthood, entirely due to the fact that he felt immense guilt for his inability to react nobly during Hassan’s rape.