very person he sees as a rival for that affection: Hassan. Amir must, in fact, rely on Hassan twice: as line feeder and as kite runner. The one who runs down the last opponent’s kite will receive a highly coveted trophy, which Hassan will give to Amir and Amir in turn will give to Baba.

Amir’s triumph goes horribly wrong. Hassan does find the kite, but he is then found by Assef and his gang. Assef, who neither forgets nor forgives any slight, such as Hassan’s rescuing Amir from Assef’s wrath two years earlier, takes his revenge by sodomizing Hassan. Amir secretly witnesses Hassan’s humiliation but does nothing to prevent it. Experiencing the shame of his own cowardice as well as of Hassan’s knowledge of it, and dismayed by Hassan’s having met his fate so resignedly, Amir returns home to the paternal love he had long craved but now cannot bear—just as he cannot bear the look of “guileless devotion” he sees in Hassan’s eyes in place of the blame and indignation Amir knows he deserves. The better to hide his own secret sin, Amir betrays Hassan a second time, resulting in Hassan leaving the relative paradise and safety of Baba’s home.

As Amir’s personal situation deteriorates, so does the political situation in Afghanistan. The overthrow of the monarchy in 1973 ushers in decades of instability. Baba and Amir flee in 1981 and eventually settle in California, where they suffer a complete reversal of fortune. Baba “loved the idea of America. It was living in America that gave him ulcers.” “For me,” Amir says, “America is a place to bury my memories. For Baba a place to mourn his.” By decade’s end, Amir has completed college (majoring in English), lost his father (to cancer), married Soraya, a (previously rebellious) member of the local Afghan community, and published his first novel. He knows that overall he is very fortunate, but he also believes that he does not deserve his good luck. His marriage to a woman “with a past” reminds him of his own secret sin, and the publication of his novel reminds him of long-suppressed memories of Hassan and of Rahim Khan, his father’s former business partner, both of whom had encouraged his writing many years before.

A phone call from a dying Rahim Khan in June, 2001, sets in motion the novel’s final movement. “Come, there is a way to be good again,” Rahim tells Amir, and Amir heeds the dying man’s cryptic summons. After arriving in Peshawar he learns, from Rahim and from Hassan’s letter, which Rahim delivers, all that has happened since 1983 to his home, his country, his surrogate father Rahim, and above all to the friend he only now learns (and Hassan never knew) was his half-brother. This is Baba’s guilty secret, born of his need—sexual or emotional—following the death of his wife in childbirth one year before: an act with many consequences for Hassan, for Hassan’s “father” Ali, and for Ali’s wife, who would flee the son she had borne.

Amir also learns that Hassan and his wife are dead, murdered by the Taliban, but that their son is alive. The way for Amir to be good again is to find the orphan and rescue him from the hell that Afghanistan has become under the Taliban. Offered this opportunity to atone for his and his father’s sins, Amir is at first reluctant, preferring to pay someone to rescue the boy, but Rahim is insistent, tricking Amir into thinking that once he finds the boy, Amir will have fulfilled his obligation.

Although he did not return to Kabul until March, 2003, months after completing the novel, Hosseini gives an account of Amir’s journey into the Taliban heart of darkness as vivid and harrowing as the journalist’s return in the film Kandahar (2001). Here is a country ravaged by decades of war, where everyone is suspect and executions are common. Amir learns that he has always been what he is now: a tourist in his own country, once protected by his father’s wealth and now by a loyal driver and a fake beard. He traces Hassan’s son, Sohrab, to an orphanage and from there to Assef, who has found in the Taliban a perfect outlet for his pathological bullying and in Sohrab a perfect outlet for his predatory sexual desires.

The showdown between Amir and Assef is melodramatic, and the scene in which Sohrab saves Amir is similarly unconvincing because it is so predetermined. Overall, though, this part of the novel succeeds on the strength of Hosseini’s depiction of Kabul, his handling of Sohrab’s powerful but undeserved feelings of guilt and shame, and his introducing a number of vividly drawn minor characters: the loyal driver Farid, the U.S. Embassy official Raymond Andrews, the immigration lawyer Omar Faisal, and especially the orphanage’s director, Zamra, a good man placed in a horrific situation and forced to make impossible choices that require sacrificing some children, including Sohrab, in order to save others, even if only for the moment. After several delays, much anguish, many legal hurdles, and one suicide attempt (the boy’s), Amir returns to California with Sohrab. While the novel ends happily, the happiness is qualified by the trauma Sohrab has suffered, by the lesson Amir has learned about making promises he may not be able to keep, and by the deep sense of loss which atoning for past wrongs cannot quite assuage.

The Kite Runner is a novel of conflict, and the conflicts range from warring armies, factions, worldviews, and ethnic groups to the conflicts between individuals, fathers and sons and Amir and Baba in particular. Underlying many of these conflicts, perhaps all, is the conflict between the masculine and the feminine. The absence of mothers from the lives of Amir and Hassan, like the subordination of women in patriarchal Afghan society, suggests as much. Hosseini’s critique of patriarchy and its personal and social consequences is welcome, even though it, at times, results in the writing becoming sentimental, even trite. Some of these slips are intentional, deliberate but risky attempts on Hosseini’s part to get at a layer of truth that irony cannot quite reach. As Amir explains, “A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: ‘Avoid them like the plague.’ Then he’d laugh at his own joke. The class laughed with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they’re dead on.” Just as often, they seem of a piece with the symmetry that makes a novel in which no one and nothing is without its counterpart seem a little too pat.

To call The Kite Runner a morality tale, or a tale of loyalty and betrayal, is not only to succumb to the power of its melodrama but also to miss the novel’s greater significance and achievement. This is Hosseini using fiction to make real a nation and a people not so much epitomized in as reduced to the picture of a young Afghan girl on the cover of National Geographic magazine, a people vying for the short attention span of an American public.

Deftly positioning Amir’s story against the backdrop of recent Afghan history, making each an allegory of the other, Hosseini finds his novel arriving at a particular moment in that history: September 11 and the “war on terrorism” gave Afghanistan its fifteen minutes of fame—just before attention shifted to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, leaving Afghans once again in the lurch and a cause in which the United States was no longer much interested. In this context, The Kite Runner is like the mother Amir mentions, wailing for her dead child. It raises the same question Amir does in recalling his and Hassan’s first confrontation with Assef: “I wondered if anyone would hear us scream in this remote patch of land.” If the muted optimism of its final scene derives from the writer’s desire to use fiction as a healing force, the novel strikes a mournful note, no less reproachful than redemptive, and one that could make many American readers feel ashamed of their own betrayals as well as uplifted by Amir’s hard-won affirmation.

Review Sources

Kirkus Reviews 71, no. 9 (May 1, 2003): 630.

Library Journal 128, no. 19 (November 15, 2003): 114.

Los Angeles Times, July 8, 2003, p. E6.

The New York Times Book Review, August 3, 2003, p. 4.

People 60, no. 2 (July 14, 2003): 47.

Publishers Weekly 250, no.19 (May 12, 2003): 43.

San Francisco Chronicle, June 8, 2003, p. M1.

The Times Literary Supplement, October 10, 2003, p. 25.

USA Today, May 22, 2003, p. D6.

The Washington Post Book World, July 6, 2003, p. 3.

Flashback and Foreshadowing

Khaled Hosseini frequently uses flashback and foreshadowing. Indeed, most of the novel, which begins in 2001 and ends in 2002, is an elaborate flashback that brings the reader from the narrator's childhood to his young adulthood to his manhood. Within this overarching structure, Hosseini's use of time devices provide the reader and the narrator with information about what has happened outside the action of the novel so far, as in Chapter 16, in which Rahim Khan updates Amir on what has happened to Hassan since Amir and Baba left Kabul, or in Hassan's letter, in which some of the same events are told from a different point of view.

The use of time devices like foreshadowing may also prepare the reader for an imminent event or crisis. For example, during a description of Hassan's face in Chapter 7, the narrator breaks into the description to tell the reader that this was the last time he would see Hassan's smile except in a photograph, an interruption of the forward narrative that warns the reader that something momentous is in the offing. Sometimes the use of these techniques appears to signal moments when the lives of individuals are changed forever by violence, death, or the consequences of world events. One example occurs in Chapter 22, when Amir, seated in the house of the Taliban official, nervously eats a grape from a bowl on the table. Amir remarks, "The grape was sweet. I popped another one in [my mouth], unaware that it would be the last bit of solid food I would eat for a long time," thus preparing the reader for the violence of the imminent confrontation between Amir and Assef. Foreshadowing also plays a part in Chapter 7 when Amir witnesses the attack on Hassan on the night of his victory in the kite tournament:

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.

This internal monologue hints that in the future Amir will suffer from a crisis in identity. Later in the novel, his failure to stand up for Hassan in his moment of need becomes a burden he carries for much of his life, and forces Amir to take drastic measures to recover his sense of himself as a good person.

Diction

The dialogue, or quoted conversation between characters, and the narration use a variety of modes to affect the reader. The diction ranges from detailed description to conversational. One feature of the novel's use of language is its frequent references to Afghan culture and its use of terms from Pashtu and Farsi that denote important concepts in Afghan tradition and in the lives of the Afghan community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Such terms are nearly always translated for non-Pashtu- and non-Farsi-speaking readers in a way that invites the reader to become familiar with Afghan culture while remaining engaged in the flow of action. The writing is peppered with words in Farsi and Dari (which is the version of Farsi commonly spoken in Afghanistan), followed by brief translations set off by commas. In addition to the oftheard greeting Salaam Aleikum and the oath inshallah, the reader learns the meanings of such expressions as ihtiram (respect); nazar (the evil eye); lotfan (please); yateem (orphans); and zendagi migzara (life goes on). For example, when Amir asks his father to ask Soraya's father for permission for Amir and Soraya to marry, in accordance with Afghan tradition, he says, "I want you to go khastegari. I want you to ask General Taheri for his daughter's hand." Similarly, when Soraya tells Amir about a secret from her past, he thinks, "I couldn't lie to her and say that my pride, my iftikhar, wasn't stung at all."

Interior Monologue

Interior monologue, or the words a character uses to describe his or her own feelings to him- or herself, is an important technique through which Hosseini enables the reader to become acquainted with the narrator Amir, and through him, the Afghan culture and history that propel much of the action of the story. Internal monologue is a particularly important device in this work because the action is as much propelled by political developments as by the protagonist's psychological development.

Imagery and Symbolism

The novel invites the reader to view images and symbols in the first part of the novel as mirrored by those at the end. For example, the novel is book-ended by two kite contests. The imagery of kite-fighting dominates the scene that marks the last happy moments Hassan and Amir enjoy together. At the end of the novel, a smaller kite contest between the adult Amir and a young Afghan American boy, as Sohrab looks on, suggests redemption for Amir, who has never forgiven himself for what happened to Hassan on the night of that first kite-fighting contest in Kabul years before. Similarly, Assef's attack on Hassan as the twelve-year-old Amir looks on is echoed in the battle between the adult Amir and Assef late in the novel.