Cruelty In The Kite Runner

The plot of novels is usually driven forward by one or more underlying themes that surround the majority of the actions that the main characters take. These themes range anywhere from seeking forgiveness to seeking revenge. In Khaled Hosseini’s award-winning novel, The Kite Runner, we follow the life of a young Afghani boy named Amir, who makes decision and acts in ways that not only impact his own life, but also drastically change the life of the one’s surrounding him. Many of Amir’s actions can be attributed to the main underlying theme in this novel, cruelty. We see Amir go from being the victim of perceived cruelty, to being the one causing the cruelty, to the one fighting the cruelty at the end of the novel. The concept of cruelty spearheads

Amir would even argue that Baba treats Hassan better and with more love than he treats his own blood in Amir. So, to Amir, Baba is treating him cruelly by not showing him the love and affection that a young boy needs and deserves growing up. What is interesting about this situation is the cruelty that Amir is describing and is upset with actually stems from cruelty in Baba’s past. The plot in The Kite Runner takes a turn when it is revealed that Hassan is actually Baba’s real son, and the only reason that Baba and Ali (Hassan’s “father” who raises him and also is a servant for the family) cover this up is due to the natural cruelty of the class system in Afghanistan. Hassan’s mother is a Hazara, and in this time period, Hazaras were looked down upon and seen as inferior. Due to Baba’s status as a prominent business man and figure in Afghanistan, he did not want people to know that he had relations with a Hazara and even managed to produce a child by her. Baba believed that this would have been devastating to Baba’s reputation and career, therefore he had Ali raise Hassan as if he was his own. Here