The Motif Of War In The Kite Runner By Khaled Hosseini

The motif of rape is a recurring part of the theme of war in The Kite Runner, which Hosseini uses to emphasize his point on how war can rob people of their innocence. In The Kite Runner, Amir thinks “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 77) Amir running away from the rape and abandoning Hassan is an example of the indirect characterization of Amir’s actions Hosseini uses to demonstrate how Amir is a coward and alludes to the motif of rape he has developed throughout the story. In every situation of rape we have seen such as the attempted rape of the woman when Baba and Amir were leaving Afghanistan (Hosseini 115) and the rape of

At the beginning of The Kite Runner Amir told us that Ali would tell him and Hassan that “there was a brotherhood between people who fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break.” (Hosseini 11) The words “a kinship that not even time could break.” were particularly chosen by Hosseini to foreshadow that even time could not break their bond but war could. Throughout the book, we have seen many symbols that are used to symbolize the state of Amir and Hassan’s friendship and how the war has destroyed it. The main symbol Hosseini used to demonstrate these effects was the pomegranate tree which deteriorated as the war progressed Amir said “The carving had dulled, almost faded altogether, but it was still there: ‘Amir and Hassan. The Sultans of Kabul.’” (Hosseini 264) Amir said this so that Hosseini could emphasize how the pomegranate tree's death and Hassan’s death were both used to mark the end of their friendship, and both the pomegranate tree and Hassan were killed as a byproduct of the war going on in