The violence that the main character, Amir, experiences leads to him feeling guilty for rest of his life, which breaks up the relationships that he once had in his previous years. Amir’s guilt turns brother against brother and friend against friend. In the novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled uses the character, Amir, to demonstrate how violence leads to betrayal, which creates guilt within oneself, and ultimate destroying relationships. The impact of violence on Amir leads him to betray Hassan, his only friend, brother and servant by running away from helping Hassan. Amir’s first experience of violence is when Amir wins the Kite fighting Tournament, and Hassan, runs off in pursuit of Amir’s trophy.
Amir seeks redemption for his disloyalty to his best friend when he was a child, Hassan. Because of his fearfulness during Hassan’s rape, his betrayal of Hassan after the rape, and his committing of the worst sin in Afghani culture, Amir has to take himself on a long and weakening journey for his ultimate goal of total redemption that will eventually take him back to his violent and war-torn home country. When they were young, Amir and Hassan were really best friends; the two of them were inseparable. They used to climb the poplar trees in the driveway of Amir’s father’s house and annoy their neighbors by reflecting sunlight into their homes with a shard of mirror”. Even though the two young boys were of different social classes and ethnicities, they were able to remain best friends no matter what problems would face them.
Early on, Amir strives to redeem himself in Baba’s eyes, primarily because his mother died giving birth to him, and he feels responsible. To redeem himself to Baba, Amir thinks he must win the kite-tournament and bring Baba the losing kite, both of which are inciting incidents that set the rest of the novel in motion. The more substantial part of Amir’s search for redemption, however, stems from his guilt regarding Hassan. That guilt drives the climactic events of the story, including Amir’s journey to Kabul to find Sohrab and his confrontation with Assef. The moral standard Amir must meet to earn his redemption is set early in the book, when Baba says that a boy who doesn’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.
From the opening of the novel it is shown to the reader that there is a gradual character development of Amir. He says, “Standing in the kitchen with the receiver to my ear, I knew it wasn’t just Rahim Khan on the line. It was my past of unatoned sins.” This is referring to Amir’s betrayal to Hassan, this use of dialogue shows the reader that Amir’s guilt has finally caught up with him. Amir and Hassan spent their childhood together as best friends and when Amir won his kite race, Hassan offered to fetch the winning kite. At this time, Assef the local bully approached Hassan to get the kite.
He was abused day to day ever since he was taken by the sociopathic Taliban, Assef, and likely traumatized for the rest of his life. That is no wound. However, since accepting Soraya and I as his family, I believe we have helped Sohrab recover from his dreadful past. I remember the very first time I took Sohrab kite running. There was a gathering of Afghans at Lake Elizabeth Park in Fremont in celebration of Sawl-e-Nau, the Afghan New Year.
The most substantial part of Amir’s search for redemption stems from his guilt regarding Hassan. One of the most iconic and memorable events in the novel is the kite fighting tournament which leads to Hassan being raped by Assef, forcing Amir to make a decision that ultimately results in Ali and Hassan leaving the house as he couldn’t live with them anymore. Amir sacrifices Hassan after the tournament to get the blue kite so that he can please his father and finally get some recognition in his house. However, just to get some form of acceptance from his father, he ends up destroying the only true relationship he had with anybody. Hassan was loyal to Amir until the very end and even took the blame for the watch incident and quietly left the house.
The Kite Runner Novel and Movie Comparison “The Kite Runner” tells a story about a boy named Amir and a Hazara boy named Hassan. Hazaras are discriminated in Afghanistan, so Hassan was always looked down upon. Hassan was raped later, and Amir who witnessed it ran away from the scene, which became his biggest regret in his life. Years later, Amir started his new life in America, but his sins eventually came back to his life again and set him off to his homeland to an adventure of finding Hassan’s son and brings him back to America. Both the novel and movie were exceptional.
Baba was a typical father that expected his son to be into athletic things such as soccer and such, and when Amir tried things of that nature, he felt bad because he was not as good as Baba had hoped. But one thing that interested both Amir and Baba was the Kite tournament. It was Amir’s dream to win the tournament so that Baba could be proud of something that he did. Later on throughout the story, Amir won that tournament and in order to show Baba the winning kite, the price he had to pay was to watch his friend Hassan get raped. In Chapter 7 Amir states, “I actually aspired to cowardice, because the alternative, the real reason I was running, was that Assef was right: Nothing was free in this world.
This was the last time Amir saw Hassan because after Hassan and his father left, Amir and Baba moved to America. Amir finally grew up and matured while living over there. He was a very good writter and married. He always carries the guilt of all the horrible things he did to Hassan and slowly grows out of being a selfish person into a caring individual. The next time he goes to Afganistan is when he goes to visit Rahim.
In The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Hosseini develops the idea of Amir’s search for redemption. The search for redemption is a key theme of the novel, as Amir lives with the guilt of the incidents that occurred during his childhood in Kabul. With each new challenge Amir is given the opportunity to redeem himself and prove he is no longer the selfish boy he was in his childhood. “All I saw was the blue kite. All I smelled was victory.