The Kite Runner

“Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words. Mine was Baba. His was Amir. My name. Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975—and all that followed—was already laid in those first words.”

Amir recalls Hassan, his illegitimate half-brother and family servant, reflecting on their immutable childhood bond. Their first words serve to illustrate their deepest loves as well as their greatest betrayers. Amir’s obsession with gaining Baba’s love inevitably leads him to betray Hassan.

“‘When you kill a man, you steal a life,’ Baba said. ‘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. Do you see?’”

After learning that to imbibe is considered a sin in the Islam faith, Amir asks his father if he is a sinner because he enjoys his regular glass of whiskey. Placing Amir on his knee, Baba gives Amir a rare council, explaining that theft is the only sin and all others are a variation on that same sin.

“A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything [...] If I hadn’t seen the doctor pull him out of my wife with my own eyes, I’d never believe he’s my son.”

While overhearing Rahim Khan defend him, Amir hears Baba express his concern and disappointment with Amir, whom he has observed allowing Hassan to defend him while he is teased by other children. This conversation, and Amir’s reaction to it, establishes Amir’s central motivation and conflict with Hassan, whom Baba shows occasional affection for.

“‘You should know something about me, Hazara,’ Assef said gravely. ‘I’m a very patient person. This doesn’t end today, believe me.’ He turned to me. ‘This isn’t the end for you either, Amir. Someday, I’ll make you face me one on one.’ Assef retreated a step. His disciples followed.”

When Assef threatens Amir with his brass knuckles for socializing with Hassan, a Hazara, Hassan loads and aims his slingshot at Assef’s eye. As he retreats with his cohorts, Wali and Kamal, Assef makes a promise that sets into motion the rest of the novel’s central conflict.

“The chase got pretty fierce; hordes of kite runners swarmed the streets, shoved past each other like those people from Spain I’d read about once, the ones who ran from the bulls. One year a neighborhood kid climbed a pine tree for a kite. A branch snapped under his weight and he fell thirty feet. Broke his back and never walked again. But he fell with the kite still in his hands. And when a kite runner had his hands on a kite, no one could take it from him. That wasn’t a rule. That was custom.”

Amir describes the rules of the kite fighting tournament, an important winter pastime in Afghanistan. Recounting the danger of chasing the trophy of the tournament’s last fallen kite, or “kite running,” Amir illustrates a central theme present in the narrative, the relationship between custom and pain.

“Hassan didn’t struggle. Didn’t even whimper. He moved his head slightly and I caught a glimpse of his face. Saw the resignation in it. It was a look I had seen before. It was the look of the lamb.”

When Hassan is chased by Assef for the kite tournament’s final kite, Amir watches nearby and allows Hassan to be raped. As he does, Amir recalls the Eid al-Adha, a religious celebration reflecting on the Binding of Isaac. Amir recognizes the cruelty of what he is about to knowingly allow, as well as his own complicity to Hassan’s evil act.

“‘I’ve never laid a hand on you, Amir, but you ever say that again…You bring me shame. And Hassan…Hassan’s not going anywhere, do you understand?’ I looked down and picked up a fistful of cool soil. Let it pour between my fingers. ‘I said, Do you understand?’ Baba roared. I flinched. ‘Yes, Baba.’ ‘Hassan’s not going anywhere,’ Baba snapped.”

Determined to remove Hassan from his life, Amir asks his father if he has ever considered hiring new servants. The question sends Baba into a rage. Amir’s willingness to remove Hassan for his own benefit and Baba’s flash of anger allude to the confluence of guilt driving both characters into conflict.

“‘Don’t make this even more difficult than it already is, Agha sahib,’ Ali said. His mouth twitched and, for a moment, I thought I saw a grimace. That was when I understood the depth of the pain I had caused, the blackness of the grief I had brought onto everyone, that not even Ali’s paralyzed face could mask his sorrow.”

Ali and Hassan’s exit from their work as Baba’s servants comes after Amir has framed Hassan for the theft of a watch and money. Hassan immediately confesses to the crime, and Amir realizes that he has plundered the harmony of his own home in a selfish attempt to bury the truth and guilt of Hassan’s attack. This scene marks the last time Amir will see Hassan alive.

“‘I wish Hassan had been with us today,’ he said. A pair of steel hands closed around my windpipe at the sound of Hassan’s name. I rolled down the window. Waited for the steel hands to loosen their grip.”

The passage, quoting Baba, comes years after Amir and Baba last saw Ali or Hassan. They sit together in the Ford Gran Torino Baba gifted Amir for his high school graduation as their thoughts inevitably turn to the guilt they both harbor for Hassan’s absence. While only Amir knows the truth about Hassan’s attack in Kabul, only Baba knows that Hassan is Amir’s half-brother.

“What’s going to happen to you, you say? All those years, that’s what I was trying to teach you, how to never have to ask that question.”

After Amir and Baba receive Baba’s diagnosis of untreatable cancer, Amir expresses his fear for being left alone. Baba’s reaction to Amir’s fear echoes his frustration with Amir’s unwillingness to defend himself. As Baba’s death looms over the narrative, Amir is forced to confront his fear of being left to fend for himself.

“I envied her. Her secret was out. Spoken. Dealt with. I opened my mouth and almost told her how I’d betrayed Hassan, lied, driven him out, and destroyed a forty-year relationship between Baba and Ali. But I didn’t. I suspected there were many ways in which Soraya Taheri was a better person than me. Courage was just one of them.”

Engaged to be wed, Soraya tells Amir of her deep-seated guilt for her unorthodox romance with a suitor in Virginia and the stroke she caused her mother, which left her face paralyzed. Here, Soraya acts as a foil to Amir, bringing out his need to reconcile his own past. When he fails to confess his past, it is a sign that Amir is not yet on his path to redemption.

“And I remember wondering if Hassan too had married. And if so, whose face he had seen in the mirror under the veil? Whose henna-painted hands had he held?”

After he is married, Amir’s thoughts are drawn back to Hassan, whom he has not seen in decades. This constant allusion back to Hassan illustrates the unrelenting, almost spiritual bond the brothers share. It also establishes an expectation, one that the narrative will dramatically answer when Amir finally answers Rahim Khan’s beckoning phone call.

“I dream that my son will grow up to be a good person, a free person, and an important person. I dream that lawla flowers will bloom in the streets of Kabul again and rubab music will play in the samovar houses and kites will fly in the skies. And I dream that someday you will return to Kabul to revisit the land of our childhood. If you do, you will find an old faithful friend waiting for you.”

Amir inquiries about Hassan’s whereabouts, and Rahim Khan gives him a letter Hassan has written himself. Hassan’s posthumous sentiments establish the importance of Amir’s return to Kabul to save Hassan’s son. The final line is an authorial misdirection establishing Sohrab as a literary proxy through whom Amir can make amends.

“‘But my neighbor said the Talibs were looking at the big house like—how did he say it?—yes, like “wolves looking at a flock of sheep.” They told Hassan they would be moving in to supposedly keep it safe until I return. Hassan protested again. So they took him to the street—’ ‘No,’ I breathed. ‘—and order him to kneel—’ ‘No. God, no.’ ‘—and shot him in the back of the head.’”

As Amir learns he is too late to make amends with Hassan, so does the audience. This is a turning point in Amir’s dramatic action. Where previous chapters involved Amir coming to grips with his guilt, now Amir must come to grips with the new tragedy that has befallen Hassan as he is placed on a path to save Sohrab.

“Baba had been a thief. And a thief of the worst kind, because the things he’d stolen had been sacred: from me the right to know I had a brother, from Hassan his identity, and from Ali his honor. His nang. His namoos.”

After Rahim Khan tells Amir the truth about Baba’s affair with Sanaubar, Amir confronts Baba’s hypocrisy and secret shame. This revelation ties Amir and Baba closer; now Amir’s quest for redemption is also Baba’s. Furthermore, Amir is finally free from the shadow of his father’s unattainable moral standard.

“‘I feel like a tourist in my own country,’ I said, taking in a goatherd leading a half-dozen emaciated goats along the side of the road. Farid snickered. Tossed his cigarette. ‘You still think of this place as your country?’”

Returning to Afghanistan in search of Sohrab, Amir meets Farid, an Afghani who never left, suffering the fallout and ground wars in the region. Farid raises an important question in Amir’s redemption quest: whether Amir is entitled to his Afghan identity after living in comfort as an American.

“‘Thank you so much.’ And I meant it. Now I knew my mother had liked almond cake with honey and hot tea, that she’d once used the word ‘profoundly,’ that she’d fretted about her happiness. I had just learned more about my mother from this old man on the street than I ever did from Baba.”

Arriving in Afghanistan, Amir and Farid encounter a beggar on the street who cautions Amir to avoid making eye contact with the Taliban. When he recites a line by the poet Hafez, they discover that the man was a colleague and friend to Amir’s late mother, a teacher at the local university. Although he cannot remember more than their last exchange, the rare insight into Amir’s mother’s life underscores her death as Amir’s deepest wound and likely the cause of his early obsession with Baba’s validation.

“‘Just forget it all. Makes it easier.’ ‘To what?’ ‘To go on,’ Farid said. He flicked his cigarette out of the window. ‘How much more do you need to see? Let me save you the trouble: Nothing that you remember has survived. Best to forget.’ ‘I don’t want to forget anymore.’”

As a boy in the narrative’s early chapters, Amir is an active character who makes bad choices. As a man returning to Kabul, Amir is more passive, but his choices are resolute, bringing him closer to redemption. On returning to Baba’s Taliban-occupied home in Kabul, Farid insists Amir forget, but Amir has moved beyond his immature coping mechanisms and has now fully embraced the desolation of his childhood and is ready to reach a new level on his arc toward spiritual awakening.

“When he faced our section, I saw he was wearing dark round sunglasses like the ones John Lennon wore. ‘That must be our man,’ Farid said. The tall Talib [...] picked up a rock and showed it to the crowd [...] The Talib, looking absurdly like a baseball pitcher on the mound, hurled the stone at the blindfolded man in the hole.”

Following Sohrab’s trail, Amir and Farid witness a nightmarish display at Ghazi stadium, where they are told they can find the Talib official who has purchased Sohrab. Here he is framed as a kind of Taliban icon, adorned by John Lennon glasses and absorbing the cheers of the crowd before stoning adulterers on the field of the Ghazi Stadium soccer pitch. Amir does not know it yet, but this is his first glimpse of Assef as a grown man. Afghanistan has only fed Assef’s violent sociopathy.

“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. There was something in the cup, something shiny and yellow. I blinked the blood from my eyes and saw it was one of the brass balls from the ring in the table base. Sohrab had the slingshot pointed to Assef’s face. ‘No more, Agha. Please,’ he said, his voice husky and trembling. ‘Stop hurting him.’”

In a dramatic fight to the death with Assef, Amir comes full circle with the punishment Assef promised years before. The narrative echoes Hassan’s threat to take Assef’s eye in defense of Amir when Sohrab stops Assef’s relentless beating with the same threat, eventually taking the eye. This is one of many synchronicities in The Kite Runner’s pages, alluding to the presence of predetermination or fate.

“I thought about what had happened to me. Ruptured spleen. Broken teeth. Punctured lung. Busted eye socket. But […] I kept thinking of something else Armand/Dr. Faruqi had said: The impact had cut your upper lip in two, he had said, clean down the middle. Clean down the middle. Like a harelip.”

Following Amir’s harrowing fight and escape at Assef’s Taliban compound, Amir is rushed to the care of surgeons. As he recovers, he considers that among his lasting scars is one above his lip, mirroring Hassan’s harelip. Symbolically, Amir’s harelip signals his joining the ranks of other scarred and redeemed characters: Rahim Khan, Sanaubar, Farid. In The Kite Runner, scars bring their owners spiritual awakening.

“I grab a white bedsheet from the pile of folded linens and carry it back to the corridor. I see a nurse talking to a policeman near the restroom. I take the nurse’s elbow and pull, I want to know which way is west [...] The policeman is the one who points. I throw my makeshift jai-namaz, my prayer rug, on the floor and I get on my knees, lower my forehead to the ground, my tears soaking through the sheet. I bow to the west.”

Sohrab is rushed to the hospital in critical condition after attempting to take his own life. There, Amir lays to rest a central dramatic tension between Baba’s pragmatism and skepticism of organized religion and the constant and consistent intervention of fate in the lives of the narrative’s main characters. Amir returns to his faith dramatically, falling asleep while kneeled in prayer. When he wakes, Sohrab has survived his procedure.

“I want Father and Mother jan. I want Sasa. I want to play with Rahim Khan sahib in the garden. I want to live in our house again [...] I want my old life back.’ [...] Your old life, I thought. My old life too. I played in the same yard, Sohrab. I lived in the same house. But the grass is dead, and a stranger’s jeep is parked in the driveway of our house, […] Our old life is gone, Sohrab, and everyone in it is either dead or dying. It’s just you and me now. Just you and me.”

Amir waits at Sohrab’s bedside while he sleeps, just as Sohrab waited at Amir’s. When Sohrab wakes, he tells Amir that he longs for his old life and is “tired of everything” (308). Amir reflects on the way the past has been thoroughly lost to both. Although Sohrab is linked to Hassan, serving as a proxy to the titular kite runner in many instances, Sohrab and Amir are connected through a survivor’s guilt in this passage. Together, Sohrab and Amir must face the uncertain future even after life has already taken so much from them.