Kite Runner
The Kite Runner is Afghanistani-American novelist, Khaled Hosseini's best-selling debut novel, a tale of betrayal and redemption that rises above time and place while using the backdrop of modern Afghanistan. Two boys who have been friends since birth discover how friendships can be destroyed by lies, race, and the influence of other people. That jealousy can cause someone to change. Fear and being a coward can make friends turn against each other even if they don’t mean to and that one little mistake can ruin a friendship and can come back to haunt you for many years.
Amir is a privileged Afghani child living alone with Baba, his father, in a large house in Kabul in the early 1970's. There is even a servant's shack on the property in which to house Ali, Baba's servant, and his son, Hassan. Though Hassan is Hazara, an ethnic group highly discriminated against, Hassan and Amir are best friends. They don’t pay attention to stuff like that until they’re older. The only real problems they face as younger kids is that Amir is jealous of having to share his father’s attention with Hassan. Amir and Baba don’t have a close relationship from the start. Baba feels that Amir is nothing like him, he is much more “weak in the eyes of Baba. However Baba looks at Hassan and sees a lot of himself in Hassan. He is strong minded and can defend himself. This bothers Amir greatly. At one point Amir asks if they can get new servants and Baba is infuriated. “You bring me shame. And Hassan…Hassan’s not going anywhere, do you understand” (Hosseini). Friends since birth and Amir tried desperately to get rid of Hassan.
“For you a thousand times over” (Hosseini). Hassan always says this to Amir, he is a truly loyal friend to Amir and it would be obvious for Amir to be the same way back but he’s not. Hassan is always standing up for Amir but Amir can’t bring himself to do the same back because of Hassan being a Hazara. He’s so afraid about what other people will think about him that he betrays Hassan when he needs him the most. When Hassan is being attacked by a group of older boys all Amir does is watch in fear, he later takes off and pretends like nothing has happened. “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” (Hosseini). Just like that a friendship can be changed forever.
Every decision that is made is never given a second thought. No one thinks that it will ever come back to haunt them but Amir found out that they can and will. Even as Amir grew up and even though he was living in America now, he still thought about Hassan every day and what he did to him. No matter what he will always have guilt for what he had done and that he could’ve prevented it. “It’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out” (Hosseini). No one can hide what has happened in the past but the only way to free yourselves from the guilt is making things write and that’s what Amir does. He does the only thing he can think of to payback Hassan for everything he had done for him. Amir rescues Hassan’s son.
The Kite Runner is an epic story, not only does it show the cruelty of Afghanistan's recent history - the Soviet invasion, Mujahideen, and the Taliban. But it is the story of internal strife that makes Khaled Hosseini's novel as beautiful and as terribly haunting as it is. As Amir's wife tells him, "sad stories make good books."