Redemption In Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner

Reward and Punishment
Redemption is a rather broad statement, despite how a dictionary may define it, because it always depends on the situation at hand. When the word “redeem” or “redemption” is heard, people often think of renewal, or refreshing. With a well-rounded analysis, it is see often that redemption can be a horrid punishment, a soul-cleansing reward, or sometimes not even needed in the first place, all depending on who seeks it and what for.
In Khaled Hosseini’s Kite Runner, the main character, Amir, since the age of 12, sought redemption after watching his best friend, and half-brother, Hassan, get violently raped. Even though he did nothing, that was precisely his crime, doing nothing. He just stood there; he did nothing to help

Hassan. After that, Amir did as much as possible to distance himself from Hassan, despite all the chances Hassan gave him to make thing normal again. Even though Amir denied his need for redemption, it was easy to see through his actions and thoughts. On page 92, chapter 8, Amir and Hassan are at pomegranate tree. Amir said, ““What would you do if I hit you with this? I said, tossing the fruit up and down…I hurled the pomegranate at him…“Hit me back!” I snapped… “Hit me back, goddamn you!” I wished he would”(Hosseini, 92). Amir wants Hassan to hit; he wants Hassan to basically punish him for not saving him. Since the night of the rape, Amir has been punishing himself, as seen when Amir said, “I thought about Hassan’s dream, the one about us swimming in the lake. There is no monster, he’d said, just water. Except he was wrong about that. There was a monster in the lake. It had grabbed Hassan by the ankles, dragged him to the murky bottom. I was that monster. That was the night I became an insomniac”(Hosseini, 86). This is where redemption is punishment. In order to receive redemption, one must suffer.
Then, there have been times when redemption is not needed.

In the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, the main character, Andy Dufresne, was sent to life in prison for supposedly murdering his wife and her secret lover. Some viewers say Andy, himself, wasn’t sure if he was guilty or not; he told the judge that he was innocent, but also said he had been drinking that night. It was only until about 17 or 18 years later when Andy truly found out that he was innocent; a new prison mate told him about how he heard from his old cell mate in another prison told him of a crime he committed that sounded exactly like Andy’s. However, even with this evidence, the prison’s warden wouldn’t let Andy leave, since Andy had become an efficient book keeper and money manager in the prison. The warden had the prison mate murdered, covering up Andy’s last bit of evidence of innocence. A conspiracy part of the movie, though, is that Andy knew along that he was innocent and had planned an escape for years. For the 19 years Andy had been in Shawshank, he had been digging a tunnel from his cell to the pipe system, where he broke through a sewage pipe that led far outside the prison to a filthy creek. And before that, while still in prison, Andy had created a fake identity under the name of Randall Stevens with its own birth certificate, driver’s license, etc., despite it being illegal; he claimed it was for some banking business for the prison. In a way, Andy’s “redemption” was reversed; it is seen when he told his friend, and fellow prison mate, Red, “It seems all it took was being sent to prison to make me a criminal.” Red even said, “He crawled through a river of shit, and came out clean on the other side.” To gain his unneeded redemption, Andy had to do the

opposite.