What Are The Rhetorical Devices In The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is a fictional narrative about a man who grew up in Afghanistan. Hosseini uses his personal experience from his childhood there, and other general knowledge about the area, to tackle issues of the Middle East that western culture often ignores. Every page of this novel is rhetorically rich with devices like diction, analogy, and realism. There is a short anecdote, beginning on page three and concluding on the top of page four, that embodies many of these great rhetorical strategies that Hosseini employs. This childhood flashback effectively introduces, and characterizes, two of the novel’s main characters, along with establishing a relationship between the narrator, later named Amir, and his childhood friend.

Hosseini stays within the parameters of the story Amir is telling. By doing this, describing Hassan becomes a natural part of the novel, rather than feeling forced. The author uses a metaphor to describe Hassan’s features. To quote the passage directly, Hassan had “a face like a chinese doll chiseled from hardwood," this metaphor emphasizes his smooth complexion, and his predominantly asian features, and also keeps the reader engaged. Having the image of a chinese doll to focus on gives the imagery perspective makes it more compelling. When Hosseini describes Hassan’s final defining physical feature, his cleft lip, he accentuates it by assigning it its own unique part of the metaphor: the doll

The passage doesn’t delve deeply into Ali’s character, but does present the character at face value. Just as he had with Hassan, Hosseini uses the opportunity the story presents to characterize Ali. When he finds the boys in the tree misbehaving, the readers learn that Ali is kindhearted, and thus doesn’t become as angry as others might. The wagging of his fingering and waving the boys down, rather than shouting, is an example of this kindness. Many angry parents would not scold their children so calmly. In connection to this idea, but also building another aspect of Ali’s character, Hosseini then uses, in order to prevent the flow of the paragraph from being interrupted, dialogue embedded into a sentence; rather than have Ali actually say these things Hosseini tells us he said them. The line says “He would take the mirror and tell us what his mother had told him, that the devil shone mirrors too, shone them to distract Muslims during prayer,” which establishes that Ali is a religious