The Kite Runner Guilt Essay

Think of a time where you’ve felt guilty. Now, think of the reasons why you felt guilty. Was it because of something you said? Something you did? Or in some cases, something you didn’t do to help someone? In Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, the source of guilt comes from to the latter reason, when the main character, Amir, doesn’t step in to help his best friend from getting raped. Amir struggles to find atonement for his sins but doesn’t find it until 26 years later. Throughout the book, the characterization of Amir, the use of parallels, and the symbolism of the kite convey that a when a person betrays a close friend, it almost always has the repercussion of guilt, leading to the betrayer seeking redemption.

In the Kite Runner, the characterization

of Amir transforms him from a coward to a selfless person through redemption, because of the guilt he experiences when he betrays a friend.

At the beginning of the book, Amir was characterized as a coward due to when he come across his best friend in an alley, about to get raped. His best friend Hassan initially set out to get the kite in order to help Amir get his father’s approval. But when he runs into Assef, another boy their age, Assef demands the kite be handed over or Hassan will be punished. Hassan doesn’t hand it over and as Amir stands in the alley struggling to make a decision of whether to step in or run, he thinks,“I had one last chance to make a decision. One final opportunity to decide who I was going to be. I could step into that alley, stand up for Hassan – the way he'd stood up for me all those times in the past – and accept whatever would happen to me. Or I could run. In the end, I ran.” Amir’s decision haunts him for a little over a quarter of a century and during that amount of time, he considers himself a coward. It results in his perpetual guilt as well, because when making that decision he also lied to himself, by saying, “I was afraid of Assef and what he would do to me. I was afraid of getting hurt. That's what I told myself as I turned my

back to the alley, to Hassan. That's what I made myself believe.” This suggests that running away because he was afraid of getting hurt made the decision more justified. But deep down, Amir knew the real reason for him not stopping the rape was because he wanted Hassan to get the kite for him, so Amir could get the approval he so desired from his father. Not only does Amir gain the kite and his father’s short-lived acceptance but he also gains the weight of his guilt and sin on his shoulders. This weight only starts to lift when he returns to Afghanistan, returning him to full circle by having the corresponding situations where he made his mistakes in the past and giving him a second chance to atone for his decisions.
This story has an astonishing amount of parallels in it, serving to establish the reoccurring theme of the need for redemption as a product of the guilt that comes from betraying a friend.

One day when Amir is grown up and married, he gets a call from an old friend, Rahim Khan and after the call he thinks, “My suspicions had been right all those years. He knew about Assef, the kite, the money, the watch with the lightning bolt hands. He had always known. Come. There is a way to be good again, Rahim Khan had said on the phone just before hanging up.” Rahim had known all about Amir’s sins, so he calls him because he knows that there is a chance for Amir to make amends for his wrongdoings of the past. Rahim knows that Hassan was Amir’s half-brother and that he also had a child. But since Hassan and his wife’s death, their child Sohrab has been in an orphanage. Rahim points Amir toward Sohrab, so Amir can go get him to partially make up for what he’s done. When Amir reaches the orphanage where Sohrab was, he finds out that Sohrab had been taken by the Taliban. He searches and confronts Sohrab’s captors and in a startling plot twist, he finds out it’s Assef who has taken Sohrab and has been sexually abusing children from the orphanage. Upon finding this out, Amir has the opportunity to atone for his sins by saving Sohrab from further abuse and creating a situation that parallels the same scenario that was the cause of his guilt years ago with the same person (Assef) enacting the

same mistreatment on the abused person’s (Hassan) son. Amir takes this almost identical situation and instead of sitting by and watching as he did before, he fights Assef, something that he was afraid of doing 26 years ago. During the fight, “Another rib snapped, this time lower. What was so funny was that, for the first time since the winter of 1975, I felt at peace. I laughed because I saw that, in some hidden nook in the corner of my mind, I’d even been looking forward to this… My body was broken – just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later – but I felt healed.” Amir doesn’t care about winning the fight, it’s the fact that fought that’s important. He’s finally getting the punishment he feels he deserves by Assef’s brutal beatings and that’s why he’s feeling “healed” because the guilty weight on his shoulders has been with him so long has finally been partially lifted. In a way, he’s giving himself up for Sohrab as Hassan once did for him, therefore repaying Hassan’s legacy and finding absolution from the guilt.
The Kite is perhaps one of the most significant symbols in the book as it represents both guilt and redemption, as it essentially is what started the events that led to Amir’s guilt at the beginning, but is symbolic of new beginnings and atonement in the end. The kite is a constant reminder to Amir of the alley where the guilt first started. But as the story reaches the end and Sohrab is living in America with Amir, they go to a kite-fighting competition in San Francisco. Sohrab had been completely closed off since they left Pakistan because of his suicide attempt and has been silent for almost a year. At the kite competition, Amir feels a spark of connection with him as he asks Sohrab,
“‘Do you want me to run that kite for you?’”
His Adam’s apple rose and fell as he swallowed… I thought I saw him nod.
‘For you, a thousand times over,’ I heard myself say.
Then I turned and ran.
It was only a smile, nothing more… A tiny thing… But I’ll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.” The roles have now been reversed, as it had once been Hassan, a Hazara, running the kite for Amir, the Pashtun. But now, Amir is in Hassan’s position, running the kite for him, thus representing the fact that Amir had to lower himself in order to rise above his post and finally finding redemption.