The Kite Runner Literary Analysis

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New historicism is a lens that looks at how a piece of literature is influenced by the time that the author wrote it. The critics view is influenced by the social, cultural and political environment, prejudice, and beliefs. The Kite Runner is a novel written by Khaled Hosseini and published in 2003. The main character is a Pashtun boy named Amir who has a socially unacceptable relationship with a Hazara boy named Hassan. The Pashtuns are considered as being of much higher class to the Hazara’s and have distinctive differences in appearances. The story starts off set in Afghanistan in the 1970’s, then in 1980 Amir relocates to California. He then makes the decision to return to Afghanistan in 2001 where everything has changed due to warfare. …show more content…

These events are mainly reflected through the main fictional character of Amir. The historical events are inspired by Hosseini’s personal life living in this time. Hosseini began to write The Kite Runner while living in the US he said he wrote “The Kite Runner, hoping to share what life in his homeland had been like.”⁵ This meant that he wanted this to be historically accurate because he wanted to share with people what it was like to be living during warfare in Afghanistan. A historical event that is reflected by Hosseini is during 1988 the Soviet Union start to pull out troops because of the peace accords which were signed by the US, Afghanistan, Soviet Union and Pakistan. He shows this in The Kite Runner "In the summer of 1988, about six months before the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, I finished my first novel, a father-son story in Kabul". Hosseini historically writes The Kite Runner as if Amir was a real person living in this time. This is backed up by one of my critics “Hosseini draws heavily on his own experiences to create the setting for the novel; the characters, however, are fictional.”¹ This is telling us that even through Amir is a fictional character most of the historical events that happen are of Hosseini’s own experiences living in Afghanistan and moving to

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