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Themes in the Kite Runner
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Life In Afghanistan
In the books A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Kite Runner, written by Khaled Hosseini, there are similarities and differences; there are similarities because they show key themes and differences because they show different perspectives through out the books. Similarities shown in both books are discrimination, loyalty, and guilt. The differences in the books are they’re both seen from either a man or woman’s point of view, and the relationship between father’s and sons or daughters and mothers.
A similarity in the books is discrimination. Discrimination is shown in The Kite Runner because there is a boy named Hassan who was a Hazara. “It also said some things I did know, like that people called Hazaras mice-eating, flat-nosed, load-carrying donkeys. I had heard some of the kids in the neighborhood yell those names to Hassan,” (The Kite Runner, 23) proves that he was discriminated towards. There is discrimination in A Thousand Splendid Suns too, between the men discriminating woman. It was said in the book, "Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always,” (A Thousand Splendid Suns, 7) this shows that men always pointed towards woman if something went wrong, and discriminated towards woman. This theme showed that discrimination is something that can happen to anyone, between race and sex.
Another similarity between the books is guilt. In each of the books, someone feels guilty for something they had done. In The Kite Runner, Amir constantly feels guilty for everything he had done to Hassan and even for things he didn’t do to Baba. He felt guilty towards Baba because he felt as if he killed his wife and turned out not enough like him, “I always felt like Baba h...
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...so he adopts his son. Ali was a great friend towards Amir because he took Baba’s son and acted as if it were his son. It also shows the relationships between father and son with Baba and Amir. Amir moves to America with Baba and lives with him. A Thousand Splendid Suns focuses mainly on mother and daughter relationships, with two women, Mariam and Laila. After both of their mother’s had died they were forced to marry a man named Rasheed. Mariam and Laila become friends and help each other escape their abusive husband.
Both of the novels show main themes and explore different points. These themes and points are obviously key components that Khaled Hosseini wants to show. He wants to show the differences because he wants to show all hardships that the people of Afghanistan go through. He also wants to show the similarities to show what is important in his daily life.
Hosseini’s purpose of writing the Kite Runner was to teach the readers the different ethnic groups in Afghanistan. The main character, Amir, is a Pashtun and Pashtuns are Sunni Muslims, then there are Hazara’s that the Pashtuns do not get along with. Hazara’s are not welcomed by the Pashtuns because they are different social classes.
Kite Runner depicts the story of Amir, a boy living in Afghanistan, and his journey throughout life. He experiences periods of happiness, sorrow, and confusion as he matures. Amir is shocked by atrocities and blessed by beneficial relationships both in his homeland and the United States. Reviewers have chosen sides and waged a war of words against one another over the notoriety of the book. Many critics of Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, argue that the novel would not have reached a lofty level of success if the U.S. had not had recent dealings with the Middle East, yet other critics accurately relate the novel’s success to its internal aspects.
In both novels, Hosseini and Steinbeck use motifs to show the power society possesses to manipulate an individual. In The Kite Runner, Hosseini continually uses the motif of blood to symbolize the sin and corruption of humanity. During a kite tournament in Kabul, the two boys, Amir and Hassan, begin to chase the final kite. When Hassan is approached by a group of bullies, including Assef, Amir decides not to intervene in order to maintain his status and place in the world. While Assef and his friends beat and rape Hassan, Amir witnesses "tiny drops [that] fell from between [Hassan's] legs and stained the snow black" (Hosseini, 78). This is the beginning of Amir’s m...
Amir learns of many things going on in another world that will hopefully help with his guilt once and for all. In Rahim Khan's call he says “there is a way to make things good again,” this may be the most powerful quote in the book as it shows both the reader and Amir that there is a solution to his guilt. Amir eventually finds out from Rahim that Ali was sterile: “she left him childless after three years and married a man in Khost. She bore him three daughters”. Amir puts the dots together and is outraged, but not only that it adds a major connection to the theme of guilt. Baba carried around the guilt of having sex with the wife of what he viewed as his brother, it shows a deeper theme that it's a generational thing starting with Baba betraying Ali and Amir betraying Hassan. Amir shows him coming to see Rahim as: “a way to end the cycle”. Amir recognizes this as his only way to relieve himself of his guilt and also Babas.
“His people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence-forces that continue to threaten them even today” (Hower). Khaled Hosseini’s novels have brought many of his readers a different perspective of Afghanistan. Many people after reading Hosseini’s books start to notice this place more and have sympathy feelings rather negative views about it. Usually people believe the media’s information that conveys about Afghanistan as a poverty place but does not specify why they live in this conditions and how those states affect their everyday life. In the two novels The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, the author Khaled Hosseini wrote the political events that happen in Afghanistan and show how those events affected Afghans’ lives in order to show his personal values of political events and humanitarianism. Khaled Hosseini uses his and other Afghan’s personal experience to send out his mission statement to his readers. Hosseini said that his message was to get his readers be a part of “the mission of [his] foundation to reach out and help people who are exactly like the characters in [his] books” (Wrenn). Across the globe, people started to give a helping hand when they start to read Hosseini’s novels.
The characterizations of the main characters are not so much different in the movie than in the book but are incomplete. The movie does not show the depth and secret desires that motivate the characters and does not allow for on to sympathize and really get to know the characters. The movie follows the basic outline of the books plot but does not incorporate all of the small details that make the book so profound. In contrast, the setting in the movie and the book is mostly identical. One line in the book tells the whole story of Amir. The line is said by Rham Khan and it is “There is away to be good again.” The line tells Amir’s true desire and that is to atone for his sins as a kid. Since both the movie and the book focus on that one line they are both more similar than different. In conclusion, although, the movie was not just like the book and emphasized certain themes more than others it still told the story and shared the lessons the book
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is an exciting and emotional book that stirs the reader into many different paths. An overarching theme that is shown throughout the two major characters (Amir and Hassan) is the element of forgiveness. The novel reveals a lot of racial and ethnicity discrimination and family secrets. As these lucrative statements get disclosed, the main character, Amir is shown to be battling with his own conscious. Forgiveness in the novel is shown in the two different relationships: Amir and Hassan, and Baba and Hassan. Amir in the entire novel tries to get his Baba’s attention and becomes very disloyal to his best friend, Hassan. On the contrary, Hassan stays by Amir’s side and always
Amir is able purge his sin of silence and lying by using his newfound life to forget of all that has occurred in Kabul. This new land of opportunity also brings Baba and Amir closer, for they need to look out for each other as a way to be successful and survive in the land of the free. Also, with a few books published under his belt and an adopted child to relieve his guilt, Amir is able to continue his future without a need for conflict both internal or external. Amir reflects back to Baba and his immigration at the end of The Kite Runner; “‘He was, wasn’t he?’ I said, smiling, remembering how after we arrived in the U.S. Baba started grumbling about American flies. … ‘In this country, even flies are pressed for time,’ he’d groan. How I had laighed. I smiled at the memory now” (Hosseini 366). Had Amir not immigrated to America, one would not see a cleansed and stable main character reminiscing about his father at the
In The Kite Runner, Amir and his father, Baba, display lives of contradictions while Hassan and Rahim Khan live lives of purity. Baba is displayed as an immoral man while at home because he is not loving his son and he cheated with his friends’ wife and had a child. Even some of Baba’s good qualities, such as his care for Hassan and Ali, his father, seem to have a selfish motive behind them because he wants to keep his son close to him. While Baba is never the father figure in the first part of the book, once they leave their home, Baba seems to care a lot more about Amir.
He would do anything, even as a small child, to please Amir. Even after he grew up and had a son, he told his son about his love for Amir. “And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words. Mine was Baba. His was Amir. My name.” (Hosseini, 12). If this was a teenage romance novel this would be a love triangle. Between Amir, Hassan and Baba. Amir spent his entire life trying to make Baba like him, to forgive him for killing his wife, to understand him, and get that special father to son bonding. Baba instead gave his attention to the servant’s son, Hassan. Later the story we find out that Hassan is Baba’s son too, but this is after both have died and Amir is a grown man. During his childhood Amir would have done anything to gain his father attention like Hassan had. Baba, feeling guilty, gave his attention to Hassan, and treated him kindly, out of guilt for not being able to recognise Hassan as his son. Yet Baba never treated Amir diskindly, other than the fact they never got along. Hassan did not go to school, and spent his time helping Ali with household chores, but got respected by Baba, and given gifts during holidays and a kite for flying season. Amir and Baba did not click in the way both of them wanted too. Amir tried to fake interests in sports for Baba, but after watching a rider get trampled by his horse, and started crying during the one and only sport event Baba took him too. “I cried all the way back home. I remember how Baba’s hands clenched around the steering wheel. Clenched and unclenched. Mostly, I will never forget Baba’s valiant efforts to conceal the disgusted look on his face as he drove in silence.” (Hosseini, 23) This was Amir memory of the sporting event. Amir need for love from Baba, led him standing in the alley watching Hassan get raped, knowing that when he brought that blue kite to Baba he will earn his love. Hassan on the other hand could not love Amir any less. To
Betrayal, redemption, and forgiveness are all major themes in The Kite Runner written by Khaled Hosseini. The novel also focuses around the theme of a broken relationship between father and son as well as facing difficult situations from ones past. Amir and Hassan are best friends with two completely different personalities. Each character in the novel faces their own hardships and eventually learns to overcome those difficulties. Beginning with betrayal then the characters have to make their way to gaining redemption and forgiveness from others, as well as their self, is carried on throughout the novel. It is a continuous story of the relationships between Amir and his father Baba and facing their challenges from the past every day of their present.
Khaled Hosseini, author of A Thousand Splendid Suns, is indisputably a master narrator. His refreshingly distinctive style is rampant throughout the work, as he integrates diverse character perspectives as well as verb tenses to form a temperament of storytelling that is quite inimitably his own. In his novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, he explores the intertwining lives of two drastically different Afghani women, Lailia and Mariam, who come together in a surprising twist of fate during the Soviet takeover and Taliban rule. After returning to his native Afghanistan to observe the nation’s current state amidst decades of mayhem, Hosseini wrote the novel with a specific fiery emotion to communicate a chilling, yet historically accurate account of why his family was forced to flee the country years ago.
...n childhood toys such as bikes, swing sets, and televisions. A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Kite Runner are in many ways very different, yet similar. Similar in the sense that they both give readers the outlook on Afghan culture and what they went through during those rough years dealing with the Taliban. Different in being that A Thousand Splendid Suns is written from a female perspective, which was beneficial to get the true feel and emotion they dealt with on a daily basis. In contrast, The Kite Runner is told from a male perspective, teaching more about morals, and life lessons while still sharing Afghan history. “When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband; rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness...” – Baba (The Kite Runner)
...one group. In both of his novels, Hosseini has both protagonists and antagonists originating from Afghanistan. He depicts the flaws of the broad generalizations many people believe due to a lack of information or insight into the concerning situations occurring in Afghanistan. As awareness about the indecencies taking place in Afghanistan increases, hopefully more individuals will take action to aide those being oppressed and help solve the turmoil occurring due to the presence of the Taliban.
Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner, grew up in prejudiced Afghanistan during the 1960’s as a middle-class Pashtun living with Hazaras working for his family. His move to America after the Communist Coup proved difficult for his family, especially his father. In his novel, Hosseini writes through a young boy, Amir, very similar to himself, who grows up with his father and two Hazara servants in Afghanistan at the time of the Taliban attacks. Both Amir and his father, Baba, treat their servants, Hassan and Ali, like family. Society, however, does not approve of such relationships between Pashtuns and Hazaras. As Amir hides and watches horrified, another Pashtun boy rapes Hassan. This leads to the continuation of Amir’s internal conflict about the treatment of Hazaras by the public, and also makes him feel guilty and self-conscious throughout his entire life. In addition, Amir strives for affection and attention from his rather indifferent father. Amir’s outward conformity to societal values in his relationships with both Hassan and Baba, as a result of his inner struggle and guilt, contribute greatly to the significance of The Kite Runner.