Amir And Hassan Foil

Literary Foils
Amir and Hassan although they seem to be the best of friends, might have a friendship fall apart, because one of the biggest issues with these two characters is their opposing personalities causing a foil to occur between themselves. We can see through Amirs and Hassan’s actions that sometime in the book their personalities are going to clash and cause conflict between the two of them.

Amir is Pashtun, and Hassan is a Hazara which in Afghanistan is two minority groups based off religion and location that live in the same area, but don’t get along very well, sort of like the White Americans and the African Americans in the United States during the 20th century. Early in age, these differences between them don’t seem to matter,

Hassan starts out at the beginning of the book, protecting Amir from the wrath of Hassan’s father, even though we all know that Amir if the main cause of the problem, Hassan has taken upon himself to protect Amir from the wrath: “Yes, Father, Hassan would mumble, looking down at his feet. But he never told on me. Never told that the mirror, like shooting walnuts at the neighbor 's dog, was always my idea” (Hosseini 4). This relationship is pretty strong. Making up lies about the actions of another person is like, way up there in friendship status, but, by the end of the reading, we learn some horrible news, after Hassan gets the surgery to repair his cleft, the last words of chapter five read: “ Because that was the winter that Hassan stopped smiling” (Hosseini 47). Usually, after someone pays for a major surgery that isn’t a direct relation to you, you feel happy, simular to the feeling of finding out you are getting a new kidney after having to deal with the idea effects of having a bad kidney for most of your life, most people are usually extremely happy and gracious for the action they received. Hassan though, never smiles again. This means that Hassan is ungrateful for the operation, and is slowly learning that his friendship with Amir is falling apart and eventually, someone is going to get hurt, and he hopes it isn’t himself. Earlier though, we learn that a few people are mad at Amir and Hassan 's friendship, as the two were walking around, they were met by a trio of people threatening to beat up the two of them. Hassan successfully scares them off, but not after a warning of what ties the main bully has with the new leader of Afghanistan: “I’ll ask the president what the king didn’t have the quwat to do. To rid Afghanistan of all the dirty, kaseef