Theme Of Power In A Thousand Splendid Suns

Power and Corruption

When in the wrong hands, power can be used as a weapon to exploit and belittle others. If power is misused, it usually leads to dire consequents, like in A Thousand Splendid Suns, where two women fall victim to those who control them. In the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini proves that once a person is promoted to a place of authority, he or she will inevitably become corrupted by the power that he or she holds.

For power to hold any value, one must be able to generate fear and submission from his victims. In order to create those fears, In How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster uses the example of the metaphorical “vampire” to represent the corrupted authority figure. Foster’s vampire is one who believes

In How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster asserts that once a character begins to think like a vampire, they begin “denying someone else’s right to live in the face of our [their] overwhelming demands” (22). Power gives characters a sense of control that allows them to make others feel inferior, while also controlling others for their own personal gain. This corrupts characters into perceiving others as less than human, as shown in A Thousand Splendid Suns, when Rasheed uses multiple acts of violence against his wives in order to control them. One of the ways he asserts his power over his first wife, Mariam, is when, “His powerful hands clasped her jaw. He shoved two fingers into her mouth and pried it open, then forced the cold, hard pebbles into it” (Hosseini 104).When Rasheed forces Mariam to eat pebbles, he represents the corrupted person, or vampire, who only perceives his wife as an object that seeks to serve him and his relentless demands. After a while, Rasheed begins to look at Mariam as a burden that needs to be lifted off of his shoulders, so he tortures and abuses her, turning himself into a monster in the process. Furthermore, Rasheed does the same thing to his other wife, Laila, and his daughter. When Laila and Aziza attempt to escape, Rasheed is outraged, so he asserts his power when, “ [He] had not given them any food, and worse, no water. That day, a thick, suffocating heat fell on them. The room turned into a pressure cooker” (Hosseini 270). In order to assert his dominance, Rasheed locks Laila and Aziza in a room. His power over Laila and Mariam lead him to believe that his abuse was just a means of control, so it was not harmful in any way. His greed for power and control corrupt him, destroying the last piece of humanity that he has left. Rasheed becomes a true vampire due to the fact that he uses the power that he