Amir's Betrayal

Rosamund Lupton, a renowned author, once wrote “I get up and pace the room, as if I can leave my guilt behind me. But it tracks me as I walk, an ugly shadow made by myself.” These words accurately describe one’s feelings after betrayal, such as the one portrayed by Khaled Hosseini. In the novel The Kite Runner, Hosseini uses the journey of Amir to represent that when man betrays, he will feel guilt, but ultimately find redemption.
Because Amir is feeling distanced from his father, he is driven to betraying his best friend Hassan, by leaving him to be assaulted in an alley. Amir doesn’t have a very good relationship with his father. He is very different from him, and his father, Baba, doesn’t like this. Amir is almost the complete opposite of Baba, and because of this, Baba is sometimes not as fatherly a
He outlasts everyone, and ends up winning. Hassan goes to chase down their opponent’s fallen kite, but meets his and Amir’s nemesis, Assef. Amir goes to find Hassan, and when he does, he discovers that Assef and his cronies are sexually abusing Hassan. Instead of saving Hassan, he sits and watches, reasoning that “nothing was ever free”, and that “Hassan was the price [he] had to pay” to get the kite (Hosseini 77). This is most definitely a betrayal of Hassan. No one can pretend that Amir got scared and ran because he actually consciously thought about what he was doing. The fact that Amir reasoned with himself to justify that what he was doing was right further amplifies the seriousness of this betrayal. Amir also says that Hassan is the “price”, as if he is a tradable object. This further enhances Amir’s image that he is superior to Hassan. He even reasons with himself, and says that “he’s only a Hazara”, as if that justifies anything. After Amir gets home, he comes back to Baba, holding the kite, having finally won him over. Amir walks into Baba’s open arms, “...and in his arms, [he forgets] what [he’d] done” and he is glad about it (79). This