A Thousand Splendid Suns, a novel by Khaled Hosseini, tells the stories of a few people in Afghanistan in times of hardship. Because of the circumstances they live in, they are forced to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. As the characters grow up in this culture it becomes clear how truly difficult it is to live in war torn Afghanistan. This novel is built upon the culture in Afghanistan, the role of characters in the story, and a major theme present throughout the story. The culture of Afghanistan is shown during this novel in a variety of ways. Because it is a Muslim, Middle-Eastern country, the culture is very different from America. The most prominent aspect of culture in the novel is family life. Mariam is a young girl who lives with …show more content…
Rasheed is Mariam’s husband, and later becomes Laila’s husband. He is a very conservative man that wants his wives to be covered. He thinks that men will look at them and he does not allow that. The first time Rasheed is introduced in the novel, he is already shown as being not the nicest. He wasn’t necessarily rude to start, but he was not welcoming. All that he really wanted was a son. He is a widower that lost his wife and son in years previous. He wants a son that can fill that spot. Mariam gets pregnant making Rasheed very hopeful he’ll have a son, until Mariam has a miscarriage. She can’t have children. Because of this, Rasheed no longer sees any reason to respect her. He begins to physically and verbally abuse her, causing Mariam to become unfriendly and closed off. To get the son he wants, he married Laila. Rasheed got his son. He treated his son very well, but abused his daughter and wives. “Rasheed raised the belt again and this time came at Mariam” (Hosseini, 241). This quote shows the abuse that Rasheed gave to his wives. When they didn’t do what he wanted, he would beat them. He is a cruel man that causes a lot of anxiety and stress to the wives …show more content…
An example of this theme is Mariam’s change of attitude. She was very upset and closed off. When Laila first came Mariam had no interest in being friends. She did what was expected of her and so did Laila. Laila wanted to be friends with her, but it wouldn’t work. Eventually, because of the abuse they both receive from Rasheed, Mariam begins to love Laila. Mariam becomes close with Laila and Laila’s children. This makes the two stronger, because it gives them someone to talk to. They are separated from the world. When they have someone there, the terrible times in the world seem a little less terrible. Another example of this theme is the love between Tariq and Laila. They loved one another for years, but were forced to keep it a secret. Although Laila is married to Rasheed, her heart is for Tariq. All she wants is to find Tariq and marry him. The novel ends with the two married. They are having another child, so they are playing a game to come up with a name for the child. “But the game only involves male names. Because, if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her” (Hosseini, 415). This goes back to her love for Mariam. Love is a theme in this story, because it connects the ones that truly need it. In times of struggle love is still
One example of the theme occurs when the author first introduces the story. “But the summer I was 9 years old, the town I had always loved morphed into a beautifully heartbreaking and complicated place.” (pg. 1). The author is saying that the year she turned nine, she found out something about her town that broke her heart and changed the way she saw it. This quote is important because it supports the theme. It shows that now she is older she has learned something about her town that made her wiser than when she was younger. She is now more informed because the new information changed her and caused her to begin to mature.
Rasheed tries to convince Mariam that the only way to keep Laila safe is by marrying her. He ends up hiring a man named Abdul Harif to tell Laila that he had met the love of her life, Tariq, in the hospital and that he had died. Laila is told this right when she finds out that she is pregnant with Tariq’s child. Rasheed had hired Abdul Harif to tell Laila this because he wanted to get Laila to marry her. When Rasheed brings up marriage to Laila, she jumps on board right away, and falls into Rasheed’s trap. After Rasheed and Laila get married, he treats her like a queen. He becomes very protective of Laila. Almost all his attention is spent on her, and in a sense, forgets that he is even married to Mariam. But him acting affectionate and caring does not last very long. When Laila gives birth to a baby girl, named Aziza, Rasheed starts to treat Laila how he treated Mariam when she could not successfully carry a child full term. Again, Rasheed ends up not getting what he wants, and therefore he turns onto Laila. The abuse, both verbal and physical, starts to get worse in the household. A particular situation that displays just how violent the abuse in their household can get is when he locks Laila and Aziza in their room, and Mariam in the shed because they tried running away from Rasheed and the abuse. He leaves them without water or food, and it ends up almost killing Aziza. This is where Rasheed falls into the paradox of power again. “ ...the 16th century Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli insisted that compassion got in the way of eminence. If a leader has to choose between being feared or being loved, Machiavelli insisted that the leader should always go with fear. Love is overrated” (Lehrer The Power Trip). Rasheed would rather have his own family be completely afraid of him and almost
A Thousand Splendid Suns takes place in Afghanistan, more specifically in cities like Kabul, Irat and Muree. The story of this novel happen on a long period of time, approximately from 1974 to 2003. What should be retained from those facts is that the story is going in the Middle East, a Islamic country in which the religion has a major influence in the culture and that Afghan society is known to be misogynist. Also, during the
Women are beaten, and it is culturally acceptable. Like routine, women are beaten in Afghanistan almost every day. When a person purposely inflicts sufferings on others with no feelings of concern, like the women of Afghanistan, he is cruel. Cruelty can manifest from anger, irritation, or defeat and is driven by self-interest. An idea that is explored in many works of literature, cruelty also appears in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns in the relationship between a husband and wife. In their case, the husband uses cruelties in the form of aggression are to force his wife to submit. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini’s use of cruelty elucidates the values of both Rasheed and Mariam as well as essential ideas about the nature of
In Part three, a shift in this isolation occurs when Laila becomes a part of her life. An epiphany occurs where Mariam starts to realize the injustices that surround her; The amount of her life wasted with Rasheed, the physical and emotional abused endured from him, and the injustices she knows Laila is about to endure.Then as she starts to bond with Laila, Mariam feels a sense of purpose; the kids look up to her as a secondary mother figure and she has Laila as a companion. So when Rasheed had the intent to kill Laila, Mariam had to act. She has taken justice into her own hands by responding to Rasheed’s physical injustice and the injustices of equality rights towards women at the hands of the Taliban. She later tells Laila that she was simply “acting like a
...ound.”(274) Rasheed’s want for power increases after talking to the Taliban because he believes the he is the real master behind everything, making him the true hero to Mariam and Lila. It is ironic Rasheed believes that his is the true hero because the actions that he had towards Mariam and Lila made them the people they were and it made Mariam’s heroism come over even more.
Rasheed was the man in the relationship and Mariam was the typical wife that did her wifely duties and stayed home while he goes and works and provides money. He treats her as if she’s worthless and means nothing to the world. When he eats he doesn’t look at her or speak to her, he is demanding, and tells her how worthless and uneducated she is. This then leads to him becoming abusive punching her, slapping her, kicking her, speaking rudely to her, he did this to damage her. A lot of this occurs because Mariam can get have his son and she is also considered a harami. Everything she does infuriates him and blames all the issues on her. She constantly tried to avoid making mistakes and did everything to his liking, but he always found a way to abuse her and blame it on her. Rasheed did not care about anything but himself he abided by the patriarchal stereotype ,which is being the dominant one throughout society and making women inferior. Mariam felt powerless and fearful. She was a victim of abuse and oppression. She married a man that said everything he did was normal in a relationship. Even though Mariam was in a violent marriage she became a strong women and soon she overcomed these
The novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is set in Afghanistan. It covers about a 50 year time period from the 1950’s to the mid 2000’s. Hosseini uses allusions to actual Afghani events to depict the ever changing liberties that the women of Afghanistan endure with the lack of stability in Afghanistan’s government.
In his novel “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, Khaled Hosseini skillfully illustrates many aspects of Afghan culture to the reader. The novel explores the struggles that have plagued Afghanistan, and how they have affected the lives of its people. Through the story’s two narrators, Mariam and Laila, the reader is presented with examples of how the nation’s culture has changed over time. Through “A Thousand Splendid Suns” Khaled Hosseini emphasizes the struggle in the area between traditional beliefs and progressive changes, specifically as they relate to women’s rights. Throughout history it has been shown these that progressive reforms are unable to coincide with strict Islamic beliefs.
Throughout Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, the reader observes many injustices committed due to the presence of the Taliban and cultural conflict in Afghanistan. One of the most concerning issues in Afghanistan is the mistreatment and inequality that women face on a daily basis due to Taliban mandates. Women in Afghanistan are treated as inferior beings to men and are unable to stand up for themselves due the laws the Taliban enforces. Hosseini uses the wives of Amir and Hassan, Soraya and Farzana, to represent the injustices to which women in Afghanistan are subjected.
The novel A Thousand Splendid Suns explores the plight of women in Afghanistan; the focus is put on three women Nana, Mariam and Laila. Women in Afghanistan often face difficult and unfortunate situations. In this essay we will examine some of these unfortunate situations for women.
The Arabian Nights.Trans. Husain Haddwy. Ed. Muhsin Mahdi. New york: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990. E Book.
According to dictionary.com culture is: “The integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that is both a result of an integral to the human capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. Culture thus consists of language, ideas, beliefs, customs, taboos, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, and works of art, rituals, ceremonies, and symbols.” Keeping this definition in mind it is quite easy to recognize the differences between Afghanistan culture and the culture of the United States. Additionally the amount of cultural stress that both main characters must have encountered when they relocated from Afghanistan to the United States. This essay will examine the cultural stress and differences that the character Baba went through with his relocation from Afghanistan to the United States.
In a nation brimming with discrimination, violence and fear, a multitudinous number of hearts will become malevolent and unemotional. However, people will rebel. In the eye-opening novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns written by Khaled Hosseini, the country of Afghanistan is exposed to possess cruel, treacherous and sexist law and people. The women are classified as something lower than human, and men have the jurisdiction over the women. At the same time, the most horrible treatment can bring out some of the best traits in victims, such as consideration, boldness, and protectiveness. Although, living in an inconsiderate world, women can still carry aspiration and benevolence. Mariam and Laila (the main characters of A Thousand Splendid Suns) are able to retain their consideration, boldness and protectiveness, as sufferers in their atrocious world.
Culture. As a society, we’re surrounded by it every day, whether we are aware of it or not. It affects what we do each day and how it lives our lives as everyone, everywhere has their own culture, their own set of beliefs and traditions that shape them, their actions, and the environment around them. Because of cultures large role in the lives of people, culture also has a large role in human geography. But there are lot of questions surrounding culture, like what exactly is culture, why are their differences in culture and what arises from those differences, and how exactly does culture interact with society to shape someone’s worldview? It is in this essay I will be answering these questions.