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Betrayal And Redemption In The Kite Runner By Khaled Hosseini

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The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is a bildungsroman about a young privileged Afghan boy who betrays his best friend and servant as a result of cowardice and ingrained social prejudices. Cursed by constant guilt, protagonist Amir flees to the United States where he hopes to bury the tragedies of his childhood. However, in order to regain his honor, Amir must return to the country of his birth to rescue his best friend Hassan’s son in now war-ravaged Afghanistan. The essay explores themes of friendship, betrayal, and redemption using the image of the kite. While Amir appears socially as the dominant individual in his friendship with Hassan, ironically the servant possesses superior characteristics in the form of loyalty, courage, and forgiveness.
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1487 Words | 6 Pages

The Kite Runner is a brilliant book by Khaled Hosseini. This novel tells the story of a Pashtun family and their Hazara servants. Amir, who is the narrator, witnesses an event that becomes a pivotal moment in his life that leaves him with a vast amount of guilt. After Ali and Hassan leave, Baba and Amir escape to America in hopes of having a better life. Amir is forced to grow up much faster, so he can take care of his father, and meets the daughter of General Taheri, Soraya; eventually they get married.

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In reality, everyone possesses a certain degree of cruelty. It is this aspect of human nature that Khaled Hosseini explores in The Kite Runner. Hosseini vividly depicts the cruelty of human nature by using anecdotes of Amir and Hassan’s childhood and by describing a Taliban-led Afghanistan. Both instances, despite the difference in magnitude, illustrate how cruelty can affect individuals and the society as a whole. Hosseini employs cruelty to serve as both a motivator as well as source of guilt for the protagonist, Amir.

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515 Words | 3 Pages

The Kite Runner Theme The theme of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is that you redeem yourself when you develop a strong sense of personal integrity because of Hassan’s incident, Amir’s moral standard, and Sohrab’s rescue from Amir. Amir’s quest for redemption is a significant idea and is basically the center of the novel. Firstly, Hassan’s incident sets the most of the plot for the rest of the novel. This happens after the kite-fighting tournament when Amir goes asks Hassan to get his blue kite after Amir’s victory, “ Blocking Hassan’s way out of the valley were three boys, the same three from the day on the hill, the day after Daoud Khan’s coup, when Hassan had saved us with his slingshot.[...]I opened my mouth, almost said something.

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77 Words | 1 Pages

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini is a novel about a young boy and his hazara or servant, Hassan. Amir, the protagonist, is a young boy who craves for his father’s love and attention. His desperation and need or his father’s affection can often alter his values and steer him into making very selfish and unethical decisions. Amir’s selfish acts puts the story as a whole into a whole new perspective in many positive and negative ways.

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796 Words | 4 Pages

Hassan is humble; Amir is jealous. Hassan is honest; Amir is deceitful. It is easy to see that the two are polar opposites. Hosseini creates a pure and innocent character in Hassan in order to highlight the negative aspects of Amir’s personality. For example, when Amir asks Hassan to “run the kite” for him, Hassan responds, “For you a thousand times over!”

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1039 Words | 5 Pages

The story ‘The Kite Runner’, written by Khaled Hosseini, takes place mainly during the war in Afghanistan. After the country became a republic instead of a monarchy, the former Soviet Union invaded the country. Many years later, the Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist movement , seized power in Afghanistan. This was accompanied by intense violence and the consequences were immense. Not only was Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, almost entirely destroyed, but the cost to human life was also huge.

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112 Words | 1 Pages

“The Kite Runner" tells a heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between Amir, the son of a wealthy Afghan businessman, and Hassan, the son of his father 's servant. Amir is Sunni; Hassan is Shi 'a. One is born to a privileged class; the other to a loathed minority. One to a father of enormous presence; the other to a crippled man. One is a voracious reader; the other illiterate. This unusually eloquent story is also about the fragile relationship fathers and sons, humans and their gods, men and their countries.

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Everyone has wronged someone in their past-- whether it was with an unkind word or with a betrayal. In Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel The Kite Runner, the main character, Amir, has to live with the guilt of wronging his servant, best friend, and secret half brother, Hassan, by watching passively as he gets raped. The Kite Runner tells of Amir, an upper class Afghan, and his childhood, immigration to America due to the Russian invasion, return to Afghanistan, and subsequent settling of debts. Amir’s guilt from not preventing Hassan’s rape causes him to drive Hassan away, and the guilt from both of these actions follow him throughout his life until he finds and adopts Hassan’s son and his nephew, Sohrab.

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577 Words | 3 Pages

Betrayal has become common in any kind of relationship whether it be dishonesty or disloyalty. For there to be betrayal there has to be trust. This is the case in The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. According to Dictionary.com betrayal means to deliver or expose to an enemy by treachery or disloyalty. Hassan constantly shows loyalty to Amir, but yet Amir still seems to betray him.

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1128 Words | 5 Pages

The connection between the relationships of Hassan and Amir and then Amir and Sohrab thrive off of the conflicts and the recurring motifs throughout the novel. Amir lived his redemiton and his loyalty through Sohrab, trying to make what he did to Hassan feel like less of a burden on his shoulders. There are many different ways for one to redeem themselves, but there is no better way to show loyalty than to be present in a time of

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Betrayal is an issue many can relate to, whether it is done by a family member or a friend. In the book The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, we witness betrayal play a vital role in the downfall of the main character’s Amir and Hassan’s friendship, and how betrayal was the reason for why Amir sought redemption in hopes to move on. The novel begins with Amir as an adult, recalling an event that took place in 1975 in his hometown Kabul, Afghanistan and how this event was what changed the rest of his life and made him who he now is. Despite this heartbreaking occurrence of Amir’s reluctance to help Hassan while he was being raped, it was the reason for why Amir later decided to be brave and stand up for what he believes in.

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751 Words | 4 Pages

On the other hand, his Hazara servant and childhood friend, Hassan, has always remained loyal to Amir even with his atrocious betrayal. His knowledge of Amir’s deceitful actions never impeded him from ultimately sacrificing himself for Amir’s benefit. Hassan’s compassionate and forgiving attitude added to Amir’s guilt, making it nearly impossible for him to forgive himself. Hassan’s tremendous sacrifice highlights his kind hearted nature, which eventually positively impacts Amir’s life turning him into a more appreciative person. Growing up together led Amir and Hassan to

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147 Words | 1 Pages

Michael Tooley takes a liberal approach on abortion. He believes that killing a fetus is morally acceptable. He debates that abortion during any stage of pregnancy should be accepted with his reason being that a fetus does not have “a serious right to life”. In his work "Abortion and Infanticide", he discuss "what characteristics [a fetus] must have in order to be considered a person." He believes that a person’s identity is progressively attained, and the fetus is not a person until birth.

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Internal conflict relies on the struggles within a person that are based on interpersonal impulses. In literary works, internal conflict can focus mainly on the psychological struggle of a character, whose solution creates the suspense of the story’s plot itself. This concept is quite vital throughout the novel The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan-born American novelist and medical doctor. In the book, Amir, the protagonist, is constantly battling himself and his own skewed logic as to what it means to redeem oneself. Redemption, defined as a person saving himself from any sin, error or evil, comes out through Amir’s strange notions about how he can forgive himself for wrongdoings, mainly with the alley rape of his father’s young servant.

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1802 Words | 8 Pages

The Kite Runner is a well crafted story about the many struggles of the main character and narrator Amir’s life concerning social class, relationships with family, and intense regret when your morals and who you think you are are threatened. The book begins in San Francisco and is narrated by an adult Amir. Throughout the story, Amir has flashbacks to his life as a kid in Afghanistan as he contemplates the struggles he went through and the choices he still deeply regrets. One of Amir’s biggest regrets is when he sees one of his friends Hassan being raped and he neglects to step in and stop it.

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