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Effects of betrayal
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Motif The slingshot that Amir gives Hassan is a symbol of bravery between the both of them. When Hassan and Amir were younger they would sit in a tree and shoot animals with it in their backyard. “Sometimes up in those trees, I talked Hassan into firing walnuts with his slingshot at the neighbors one-eyed german shepherd” (Hosseini 4). When Hassan and Amir are younger Amir is threatened by Assef. Hassan raises the slingshot at Assef and gives him 2 options and he ends up walking away. When Amir is older he is faced with Assef again, and is forced to fight him in order to bring Sohrab into America. Assef majorly beats Amir and Sohrab raises the same slingshot that was given to Hassan, and shoots Assef in the eye. Background Information Connections …show more content…
Amir is the child of a wealthy man. He has a Hazara servant who has been with him ever since they were little who he takes as his best friend.”Then he would remind us that there was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break” (Hosseini 11). Amir and Hassan have a relationship/bond that nobody could ever break. Amir was also jealous of the way his father treated Hassan. Amir’s relationship with his father has caused him to feel disappointed in himself. “No Baba jan, I said, desperately wishing I did. I didn’t want to disappoint him again” (Hosseini 29). He feels like he will never be the child that baba hopes him to be. Amir is mostly disappointed in betraying Hassan. Amir betrays him when he see’s Assef raping Hassan in the alley. At the end of the book, Amir has resolved issues, and has accepted his feelings towards Hassan. Amir has proved himself by rescuing Hassan’s son and making sure he returns with him to America. Amir has finally become the man his father has wanted him to be. Amir has been mentally set free of the guilt that he has been dealing with from the past
Amir is, to be put bluntly, a coward. He is led by his unstable emotions towards what he thinks will plug his emotional holes and steps over his friends and family in the process. When he sought after Baba’s invisible love, Amir allowed Hassan to be raped in an alleyway just so that the blue kite, his trophy that would win his father’s heart, could be left untouched. In the end, he felt empty and unfulfilled with the weight of his conscience on his shoulders comparable to Atlas’ burden. Unable to get over his fruitless betrayal, he lashes out and throws pomegranates at Hassan before stuffing money and a watch under his loyal friend’s pathetic excuse for a bed, framing Hassan for theft and directly causing the departure of both servants from his household. Even after moving to America, finding a loving wife, and creating a career for himself in writing, he still feels hollow when thinking of his childhood in Afghanistan. Many years later, he is alerted of Hassan’s death and sets out on a frenzied chase to find his friend’s orphaned son. He feels that he can somehow ease his regrets from all of those years ago if he takes in Hassan’s son, Sohrab. He finds Sohrab as a child sex slave for Assef, who coincidentally was the one to rape Hassan all of those years ago. After nearly dying in his attempt to take back Sohrab, he learns that he can take the damaged child back to the states with him. Sadly, Hassan’s son is so
Hassan agrees and gives chase for the kite with Amir follow some time later on. However, during that time Hassan is corner by Assif and several others children. Hassan is then punished by Assif for protecting Amir, as well as being a different type of Afghani. In one swift motion, Assif performs a horrifying sexual act on Hassan, all the way Amir watch it far down a street. And what does Amir do? Well he ran as he put it, “I ran because I was a coward. I was afraid of Assef and what he would do to me. I was afraid of getting hurt” (77).
After all, his very own servant is a lowly Hazara who is only meant to serve him. The feeling of superiority that Amir has over Hassan causes them to have an unhealthy relationship. Amir can and does use Hassan at times to his own benefit. The superiority complex that Amir has over impacts
Amir's mother passes away during his birth, and his left with the suspicion that his father blames him for her death. Amir longes for his father's attention and approval, but does not receive any affection as a son. He grows up with his Hazara best friend, Hassan. In Afghanistan culture, Hazaras are considered lower class and inferiors in society. Amir describes his friendship with Hassan saying, “then he would remind us that there was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break."
One day when Hassan and Amir are walking through Afghanistan, they come across Assef, a sociopathic bully known for his brass knuckles and his rancor towards Hazaras. He prepares to fight Amir and Hassan, but Hassan threatens to shoot out Assef's left eye with his slingshot, saying they'll call him "one-eyed Assef." Before the daunted bully backs off he warns them that he will have his revenge.
On his journey to save Sohrab, Amir discovers that a Taliban official took him from the orphanage. When meeting with that Taliban official, who turns out to be his childhood nemesis Assef, Amir is placed in a situation where he is forced to choose between fleeing from the enemy and saving Hassan’s son. The structure of this scenario is analogous to one earlier in the book when Amir had to choose between saving Hassan by standing up for him and repairing the relationship with his father by bringing the blue kite back. The author uses the similar setting with Assef and the similarities in characterization of father and son in order to provide Amir with the opportunity to make the choice to stand up for what he believes in. When Amir allowed Hass...
He needs to save Sohrab. Once he gets to where he is being held, he realizes Sohrab has been made into a sex slave for the Taliban. And, as if that wasn’t shocking enough, he realizes the leader of it all, the same man who executed the people at the soccer game earlier that day, is Assef. The same man who started this all in the first place. “His name rose from the deep and I didn’t want to say it, as if uttering it might conjure him. But he was already here, in the flesh, sitting less than ten feet from me, after all these years. His name escaped my lips.” “Assef.” (Hosseini 281) Amir is shocked, and angered about what he has just realized. Him and Assef have a conversation which eventually leads into Assef challenging Amir to a fight, over Sohrab. Assef beat up Amir very bad, and once the fight was over Sohrab confronts Assef, and tells him to stop. And Assef doesn’t listen, and yells at Sohrab to put it down. Sohrab then lets the slingshot shoot, aimed at Assef’s face, and it takes out his eye. While he’s hurt they all escape, this doesn’t prove to be the last trial though, as they are told by a man named Raymond Andrews that they can’t take him to America. But after awhile Soraya calls from California and says that they can take Sohrab back to America. But, once again, a problem gets in the way of Amir’s redemption. This time a rather serious one, when Amir goes to
Over the course of the novel, Baba implies that he is not proud of Amir and the only reason he knows Amir is his son, is because he witnessed Amir 's birth. He states to Rahim Khan that he thinks Amir needs to stand up for himself more often. Countless times during the novel, Amir feels like he has to fight for his affection, that he has to earn Baba’s love. In order to prove himself worthy of affection and to redeem himself for not being a son Baba could be proud of, Amir yearns to win the kite runner competition. He reminisces on a memory, when all “I saw was the blue kite. All I smelled was victory. Salvation. Redemption” (65). In the aftermath of Hassan’s rape, Amir got rid of Hassan so he would not have to face the cause of his guilt on a daily basis. Amir buries the secret of the rape deep within him, where he hopes that it will not come back to haunt him, which is not the case. “We had both sinned and betrayed. But Baba had found a way to create good out of his remorse. What had I done, other than take my guilt out on the very same people I had betrayed, and then try to forget it all? What had I done, other than become an insomniac? What had I ever done to right things?” (303). As mentioned earlier, Amir is not one who stands up for himself. In order for Amir to redeem himself for betraying Hassan, and not standing up for him earlier,
In the book Amir can be seen as a troubled young boy who is struggling with a tremendous amount of guilty. It is easy to blame Amir’s actions on his guilty and his father’s lack of love for him. The movie does not allow this. The movie characterizes Amir as a young boy who is to blind by his owns needs to be a decent and noble friend. The movie does not do a good job of showing that Amir felt horribly guilty about what he did to Hassan. It portrays Amir as uncaring and selfish. The movie also changes the depiction of Amir as an adult. While the book shows Amir as a man who has not yet learned to stand for what is right until he comes face to face with his past all over again, the movie jumps the gun and shows the change earlier with the change of a scene. The scene that is changed is when Amir and Farid visit the orphanage where Sohrab is supposed to be. In the scene Amir is the one to try and kill the orphanage owner instead of Farid which takes away from Amir’s cowardice persona that is portrayed in the book. The movie makes Amir seem stronger before his time while the book keeps up his weakling persona until he is faced with a situation he cannot help but stand up to. Similarly the characterization of Hassan is just as lacking as Amir’s in the movie. In the book, Hassan is shown as being selfless beyond a doubt and loyal to a fault.
Amir is a man who is haunted by the demons of his past. This is first shown in the opening lines of the novel “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.” (Hosseini pg.#) These opening lines of the novel foreshadow what is yet to come. You can see that Amir looking back at the past with an attempt to justify why he is the man he is today. In the winter of 1975 it was the final round of the Kite Running tournament when Hassan choice to run the last kite for Amir. In doing so Hassan is corner by Assef and his gang who question Hassan’s loyalty to Amir. They give Hassan the choice to give them the kite in exchange to do no harm to him or to...
Amir is clearly an emotionally unstable person, but his resentment towards Hassan is increased because of his own haunting guilt.
A large part of the novel deals with Amir trying to redeem himself. First with his Baba by trying to win the kite fighting tournament because Amir feels as though his father blames him for his mothers death. The the larger act of redemption occurs when trying to rid himself of the guilt of letting Hassan be rape...
Amir goes into the man’s house by himself and talks with him for a while before Sohrab comes in. Once he arrives, the man takes off the sunglasses to reveal bright blue eyes that Amir instantly recognizes as Assef’s. This realization sparks Amir having to finally face his past, there is no hiding it anymore. Assef tells Amir that they “have some unfinished business” (Hosseini 286), and he is referring to the time in the alley when Amir and Hassan were children and Hassan threatened to shoot Assef with his slingshot if he did not leave them alone. Assef ends up leaving Amir with extreme injuries and would have killed him if Sohrab had not interfered. Sohrab begs Assef to stop, and Assef threatens to kill him if he does not put down what is in his hand. “His hand was cocked above his shoulder, holding the cup of the slingshot at the end of the elastic band which was pulled all the way back” (Hosseini 291). Sohrab is mimicking the stand his father took to Assef so many years before, the reason he and Amir are fighting in the first place. Sohrab lets go of the slingshot and the brass ball inside the cup hits Assef in the left eye, tearing the eyeball out of the socket and becoming lodged inside. Thanks to Sohrab’s act almost identical to that of Hassan’s, he and Amir are able to
Amir’s childhood is spent vying for his father’s attention, feeling as though he must compete with his servant friend Hassan
Amir's blunt rejection to Rahim Khan’s request to bring Sohrab is an act of betrayal to Hassan. He betrays Hassan one more time, even when Hassan dies as a loyal friend. Through the book, Amir’s ongoing troubles haunt him as the years go by, but I believe he would take any opportunity to redeem himself.