In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini actualizes the power of the human spirit to endure great tragedy and persist to hope and love. Hosseini illuminates the unbreakable human spirit through Mariam, an Afghan woman whose life is marked by emotional and physical abuse. However, Mariam endures her past adversities to eventually attain peace. Hosseini exposes the strength of the human spirit and its unimaginable ambition to achieve happiness.
Born a harami or an illegitimate child, Maraim was deprived of a “legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home, and acceptance” (Hosseini 4). Since her childhood, Mariam understood that she was unwanted- a weed that should be tossed away, and when she was fifteen, Mariam faced her father’s rejection and her mother’s suicide. In adulthood, the frequent abuse of her tyrannical husband and her repeated miscarriages only furthered Mariam’s belief that she didn’t deserve love or family. When her husband married the young and beautiful Laila, Mariam’s desperate barrage to maintain her place in the house, despite, revealed her past: You may be the palace malika and me a
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Hosseini illustrates this innate ability to preserve through characters like Mariam, “The years had not been kind to Mariam. But perhaps, she thought, there would be kinder years to come. A new life, a life in which she would find the blessings that Nana [her mother] had said a harami like her would never see” (Hosseini 256). Mariam has not only endured emotional torment, but the suicide of her mother, the rejection her father, abuse from her husband, miscarriages, and a war that has rained havoc on her homeland for decades. Yet, Mariam prevails to achieve the hopes she had since childhood. Mariam’s life highlights the unbreakable nature of the human spirit and its ability to endure past