stealing the gifts, Baba would have known that it was Amir who had planted them. Hassan saw that the shame that would have been placed on Amir would have never allowed Baba to forgive him. Amir saw that it was

... Hassan's final sacrifice for me.

Hassan would take the blame himself, sparing the embarrassment that would have befallen Amir. Amir recognized that Hassan must have known that he had planted the gifts, and he believed that Hassan also must have known that Amir watched as he was sodomized by Assef. But Amir was in for another surprise: Baba had decided to forgive Hassan.

But theft was the one unforgivable sin... how could he just forgive Hassan... why couldn't he not forgive me for not being the son he'd always wanted?

When he saw Baba cry, Amir realized that his plot had all been for nothing. Baba would not cry for his son, but he had tears to spare for Hassan. Amir considered running after them and admitting his misdeed, but he had not the courage for such action--one he knew would cause Baba to hate him forever.

Amir is portrayed as a morally ambiguous individual who recognizes the difference between right and wrong but is too selfish and insecure to uphold his morals. As an adolescent, Amir resents the fact that Baba admires Hassan and desperately desires to earn his father's respect. Amir's own insecurities and fears prevent him from publicly acknowledging Hassan as his friend or intervening while Assef rapes Hassan. Amir also demonstrates his immorality by falsely accusing Hassan of stealing his birthday gifts. Tragically, Amir's moral ambiguity and significant character flaws ruin his friendship with Hassan as well as Baba's relationship with Ali. Amir's decision to betray Hassan ultimately influences Baba to flee Afghanistan and immigrate to the United States.

As the novel progresses, Amir matures and develops self-confidence in America, where he eventually becomes a successful writer. As a young man, Amir demonstrates integrity and sympathy by supporting Baba while he battles cancer. When Amir travels to Pakistan, Rahim Khan informs him that Hassan was his half brother and Amir makes the selfless decision to risk his life attempting to save Sohrab. Amir exercises courage, loyalty, and compassion by fighting Assef and eventually adopting Sohrab. By saving Hassan's son, Amir atones for his past sins and finds redemption. Amir positively impacts Sohrab's life and heals his own emotional wounds by redeeming himself.

As Amir is recovering in the hospital from his brutal fight with Assef, he dreams that Baba is wrestling a black bear. Amir recalls that Baba is young and strong in his dream and furiously fights with the bear as they roll on the ground. Amir sees "spittle and blood fly" during the fight, and suddenly, Baba overpowers the bear and sits on its chest. Amir then recalls seeing Baba look up at him, and Amir discovers that he is Baba. In Amir's dream, he is the person who defeated the bear.

Amir's dream symbolically represents his fight with Assef and his victory over his personal demons, which have haunted him since childhood. The blood and spittle flying during the fight correspond to his physical altercation with Assef, which almost kills Amir and results in him needing emergency surgery. Amir conquering the bear and becoming Baba illustrates his victory over his suppressed feelings of guilt. Amir has been living with guilt his entire life because he did not help Hassan while Assef was raping him. After traveling back to Afghanistan and risking his life to rescue Sohrab, Amir finally atones for his past sins and finds redemption. Essentially, the black bear in Amir's dream symbolizes both Assef and Amir's other personal demons.

Here's one structure for your paper's main body that would work.

First main body paragraph: Explain what happened to Amir when he returned to Afghanistan and saved Sohrab. He barely survived the terrible beating he endured, and it is while he is recovering in the hospital that he has the dream of Baba and the bear.

Second main body paragraph: Explain the dream Amir has while in the hospital. You can quote from the novel to show the moment when Amir sees his own face in his dream.

Third main body paragraph: Explain the significance of Amir's dream, which is very symbolic. As a child, Amir had always felt weak and cowardly. He had admired his father's courage and often felt shamed by it. He had been haunted throughout his life by his betrayal of Hassan. By saving Hassan's son, Amir had found his courage and his self-respect. When he saw his face replace the face of his father in his dream, he realized he no longer lived in his father's shadow. He had wrestled his own bear (symbolically) and won.

Good luck with your essay. The enotes links below will take you to some excellent information regarding the novel.

There are several dreams in this novel, so I will address another dream not mentioned in the other answer. In chapter 7, Amir reflects on a few dreams and memories that punctuate his narration of the present moment in which Hassan is raped. In one of the dreams, Amir is lost in a snowstorm until a hand that is bloodied pulls him out into a warmer, sunnier place. The hand obviously belongs to Hassan, as Hassan’s hands bled and were scarred from holding the glass-coated kite strings while helping Amir fly kites. This dream highlights Hassan’s role as Amir’s savior and protector in his life. As Baba notes, Hassan always stood up for Amir when he was being bullied by the neighborhood kids. Furthermore, the scars on his hands reinforce Hassan’s portrayal as a Christ figure: like Christ’s hands, which bore scars from being nailed to the cross, so are Hassan’s hands indelibly scarred.

There are several dreams--and nightmares--in The Kite Runner, but the most important one comes in Chapter 19. Amir awakes during the night in Farid's house in Jalalabad "with a scream trapped in my throat." He has had a nightmare, a vivid re-creation of the last moments of Hassan's life. As he kneels in the wet street, bound and bleeding, Amir hears Hassan muttering, "For you a thousand times over." An arm wielding a rifle puts the barrel to Hassan's head, and the trigger is pulled. When Amir traces the barrel upward to the bearer of the weapon, he sees his own face.

Symbolically, in his terrible dream, Amir has caused the death of Hassan. When he walked outside, he felt, for the first time on his journey, that he was home. He felt a kinship for his homeland again, and he had a renewed faith in the mission that he was about to undertake.

Amir is selfish at the beginning of the novel, but as he matures, he becomes more selfless. When he is young, is selfish for his father's love, and he resents his father's attentions towards Hassan, a servant boy who works for the family. Part of the reason Amir is selfish is that Baba, his father, restricts his love toward his son and is very critical of him. Later, Amir says nothing when he sees Hassan raped by a neighborhood boy, and he engineers a situation so that Hassan and his father leave the family compound. Amir suffers as a result of this incident, and the guilt he feels makes him less selfish. When he and his father move to California, they are poor and lack the social and economic capital they had in Afghanistan. Amir selflessly cares for his father, who suffers from cancer, and he marries Soraya, even though she is not considered chaste because she ran off with an earlier boyfriend. Later, when Amir chooses to adopt Hassan's son after Hassan's death, he has become truly selfless. The guilt he suffered as a boy caused him to become less selfish and more mature.

In The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, there are moments when Amir is selfish; however, his character overall is not entirely selfish.  When Amir is young, he vies for the attention of his Baba, yet his Baba is critical of him and always pushes him to perform better.  Amir is jealous of the attention that Baba gives to Hassan because he does not understand why Baba would need to show Hassan such affection.  So, one might argue that in the earlier parts of the story, Amir is selfish because he wants this affection for himself.  (Although I think Amir is more conflicted at this point than he is selfish.)

However, the majority of the novel concerns itself with developing the road to redemption upon which Amir embarks to make amends for his ill decision in the alley way.  Amir does want to set things right for himself, but he also wants good for others such as Hassan's son.  So overall, Amir is not a selfish character.

Baba believes every crime on some level amounts to thievery. Hs own father had been stabbed in the throat by a burglar, an act that "robbed him of a father."

"There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft... 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 thinks little of the mullahs and their pronouncements of what is sinful. When Amir tells his father what he has learned in school about Islam, notably that drinking alcohol is a sin, Baba takes a drink of whiskey and tells his son that he will never "learn anything from those bearded idiots.... Piss on the beards of all those self-righteous monkeys." Baba goes by his own code of ethics, one that involves honor and fairness. 

At the same time, Baba is not above bribing officials to complete an orphanage he is building; he pays "the city officials whose 'mustaches needed oiling.'"

While he cares little for the religious leaders, he does hold fast to tradition, as evidenced when he takes the proper steps to "arrange" Amir's marriage to Soraya. 

He takes a firm stand on issues and worries that Amir does not have what it takes to be a man, saying to Rahim Khan, "A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who won't stand up for anything."

Analyzing Baba in terms of morality yields rich and complex observations. Baba is a wealthy and powerful man in Kabul, and he uses his position and money for the common good. One of Baba's most charitable actions is his building of the orphanage, so he is obviously has a sense of right and wrong and of morality.

However, Baba is not religious, and in fact, is critical of some of the lessons taught to Amir by the Mullah. Baba does not take Sunni Muslim ideas of sin as seriously as others; for example, he thinks that rules again drinking, smoking, or using profanity are frivolous. Baba has instead developed his own moral code, and it is based on the notion that "there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft" (17). Baba explains to Amir that all sins are a version of theft: adultery is the theft of another man's wife, and a theft of the man's dignity, while murder is the theft of someone's life and the theft of that person from his family.

Baba's moral code seems ironic in light of Rahim Khan's later revelations to Amir, though. Rahim Khan tells Amir that Baba slept with Ali's wife and is, in fact, Hassan's biological father. Given his father's earlier attitude toward theft, Amir is dumbfounded by Baba's behavior. Amir sees him as a hypocrite. However, Baba would have known at the time he warns Amir against theft that he has committed some of the wrongs he rails against. It is possible that Baba's moral code is actually developed as a response to his behavior. Perhaps Baba feels immense guilt for his adulterous act and is pained by having to keep the secret of Hassan's parentage (for social propriety, to protect Ali, etc.). Baba's complex morality makes him an interesting character, though, and creates useful parallels between himself and his son, who is another problematic and ambiguously moral character.

Amir's greatest sin is jealousy. He craves his father's attention and so feels deeply resentful when he bestows it on Hassan. It becomes noticeable to Amir that Baba seems so much more effusive in his praise for Hassan's achievements than his. When Hassan makes his stone skip eight times across the lake, Baba pats his back and puts his arm around his shoulder. We get the impression this is something he never does with Amir.

Because of his insane jealousy, Amir doesn't have much time for the kids at the orphanage that Baba's building; they too are depriving him of his old man's attention and he doesn't like it one little bit. In one particularly vicious outburst Amir says that he hates all the kids at the orphanage and wishes they'd all died along with their parents.

Interestingly, the telephone conversation that Rahim Khan has with Amir is never fully quoted. Instead, in Chapter Fourteen, the action begins as Amir puts down the phone after this conversation that has made him so sure that he must go back to Pakistan. However, the one line of the conversation that is shared with us reveals the mixed motives that Amir has for going to Pakistan:

Come. There is a way to be good again, Rahim Khan had said on the phone just before hanging up. Said it in passing, almost as an afterthought.

Clearly, Rahim Khan, as an old family friend, is an important figure to Amir, but what this throwaway line signifies for Amir is that Rahim Khan new about his betrayal of Hassan all those years ago and also recognises the unbearable burden of guilt that Amir even now bears. Thus, Amir is tantalised and tempted by this "way to be good again," which is the real reason why he returns to Pakistan. He is desperate to make right what he did wrong so long ago.

To be more precise, Amir committed several terrible acts against his servant "friend," Hassan, in Khaled Hosseini's novel, The Kite Runner. It is true that Amir never fully embraced Hassan as an equal or as a friend or as a member of the household. These are additional guilts with which Amir has had to live. But the two specific acts for which Amir feels most guilty concern (1) Hassan's rape at the hands of Assef; and (2) Amir's planting of money and a watch in Hassan's room and then claiming that they have been stolen.

When Amir follows Hassan as he chases down a kite, Assef and his mates corner Hassan. Amir watches from a distance as the boys hold Hassan down while Assef rapes him. Amir could have come to Hassan's aid, but his timidity causes him to stay silent. When he confronts Hassan later, he pretends to know nothing of the rape, and Hassan never admits to it.

Later, after Baba has paid for an operation to correct Hassan's hairlip, Amir's jealousy gets the best of him. He takes his watch and money (birthday presents) and plants them in Hassan's room. He then tells Baba that they have been stolen. When they turn up in Hassan's room, Hassan admits to stealing them. Baba forgives him, but Hassan and his father, Ali, leave the home in disgrace. Amir can never forgive himself for these two acts.

Amir betrays his close friend twice in the story, and each time the reader experiences the feelings of shock, grief, and anger.

The first time Amir betrays Hassan takes place shortly after the kite-fighting tournament, when he witnesses Assef raping his best friend but refuses to intervene in order to save Hassan. As Amir witnesses Hassan being raped, the reader is horrified, shocked, and dismayed by the entire event. The reader hopes that Amir will overcome his fear and jealousy by helping his friend but experiences grief and anger when Amir neglects to help his friend. While the reader has sympathy for Hassan, they are upset with Amir and resent him for not intervening.

The reader experiences similar feelings when Amir betrays Hassan for the second time by placing his gifts in Hassan's room and falsely accusing him of stealing his belongings. The reader is upset with Amir's betrayal and dishonesty but understands that he has been traumatized by witnessing such a horrific event. Overall, the reader experiences shock, dismay, and anger when Amir betrays his childhood friend.

In Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner, Amir is haunted by a childhood decision, which ends up motivating many of his adult decisions. This decision was, as your question noted, an inaction rather than an action. 

When Amir is a young boy, he witnesses the rape of Hassan, a boy whose relationship with Amir is essentially that of servant. Amir does not interrupt the crime, nor does he choose to share it with anyone. In fact, in his guilt, he turns on Hassan, treating him cruelly, never apologizing for his inactive role in the situation. 

It is later revealed that Hassan was actually Amir's half-brother, which exacerbates Amir's horrible feelings of guilt. However, in the end, Amir is able to redeem himself for his inaction during his childhood.