The Kite Runner Essay

Usually what we tend to do is try to forget about the past and move on. However, in this case, as a child, protagonist Amir fails to save Hassan, what we come to know as Amir's half brother, in an act of cowardice and afterwards suffers from an all-consuming guilt. Even after leaving the country, moving to America, marrying, and becoming a successful writer, he is unable to forget the incident so permeated in his mind. In the novel, The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini uses the guilt and regret of the main character to show one of the prevalent themes, redemption, as Amir goes through horrendous events leading back to his youthful mistakes that affect him into his adult life, until that certain phone call brings him back to confront what he blatantly tried to forget. To begin, the novel starts by Amir foretelling us about ultimate sin in that winter of 1975 when Hassan gets raped and he chooses to do nothing. Towards the beginning he tells us he carried that guilt even in America, "... It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out." (Hosseini, 1). As Amir retells the story of his life, he weighs each event against his sin, his betrayal of Hassan. Another significant example was when Baba was conversing with Rahim Khan as to how Amir cannot stand up for himself unless aided by Hassan and states, " A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything." (24). In retrospect, this quote was said before the tragic event to really bury Amir deeper into guilt after the rape of Hassan, casting a big shadow of redemption of Amir as to what he could have done. And lastly,
(3)Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba." –(77)

P2 quotes:
(1)"Hassan knew. He knew I had betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time." (111)
(3)Sometimes, I think everything he did... was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.” (302)
(2)“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime, Amir.”(142)

P3 quotes:
"My body was broken—just how badly I wouldn't find out until later—but I felt healed. Healed at last. I laughed." (289)
"There's a way to be good again" –pg.238
"Rahim Khan has summoned me here to atone not just for my sins but for Baba’s too." pg 209

In conclusion, Amir yearns for redemption as a way to free himself of the many memories and years he had dealt with from the past. As memories crept in from what he thought was his past, was brought up to him from a single phone call.

*this isn't the finished essay but it's the beginning of what I have currently*