The Kite Runner (Discussion)

 After our quiz please get into groups to discuss the novel The Kite Runner.

Author: Khaled Hosseini

Born in 1965 in Kabul, Afghanistan, Hosseini uses his own personal history and knowledge of Afghanistan as part of the fictional events in the novel. As a child, Hosseini was preoccupied with "kite running" just like Amir is in the novel. There are various other similarities throughout the novel.

Hosseini’s father was a diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry, and his mother taught Farsi and history at a local high school for girls. In 1970 the Foreign Ministry sent his father to Iran. While the family only spent a few years there, Hosseini taught a Hazara man, who worked as a cook for the family, how to read and write. Khaled Hosseini was already reading Persian poetry as well as American novels, and he began writing his own short stories.

The family returned to Kabul in 1973, the year Mohammad Daoud Khan overthrew his cousin, Zahir Shah, the Afghan King, in a coup d’etat. The Afghan Foreign Ministry relocated the Hosseini family to Paris in 1976. Though they hoped to return to Afghanistan in 1980, a military invasion by the Soviet Union made this impossible. Instead, the Hosseinis moved to San Jose, California after they were granted political asylum in the United States.

Khaled Hosseini went on to graduate from high school in 1984 and attended Santa Clara University. He earned his Medical degree from University of California, San Diego, and in 1996 he worked as a full-fledged doctor. Kite Runner was his first novel and he published it in 2001. In May 2007, Khaled Hosseini published his second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns.

While Khaled Hosseini has said in interviews that the Kite Runner is largely fictional, he acknowledges that the Afghanistan he knew as a child inspired it. In a 2003 interview with Newsline, Hosseini said the passages in the book most resembling his life are those of Amir and Baba as immigrants in the United States.

Setting: San Francisco & Kabul
Genre: Literary fiction (bildungsroman)
Tone: Confessional

Themes and motifs in the book:

Kites: the kite can represent Amir's innocent childhood. Flying kites is a source of enjoyment and often regarded by the world as a child's pastime. Amir wants to be a good flyer, allowing him to connect with Baba. But after Hassan is raped, Amir does not fly kites anymore until the end and resolution of the novel. He cannot fly feeling responsible for what he allows to happen to his friend and playmate. In a Marxist reading, the wealthy Amir allows the suffering of the working class Hassan. Amir, aware of this guilt, cannot face himself or his society and must work through this conflict.

Rape: Rape represents the physical and mental domination of those who don’t have power by those who do. This is a key concept and idea in cultural studies where one power group (hegemony) suppresses another.

Fathers & sons: the relationship between fathers and sons is a recurring theme in the book.

Style:
Amir as first person narrator tells his story to us as "American" readers. Our lack of knowledge (both of the culture and the time period), misunderstanding of political events, and personal events in Amir's life allow us to rely on the narrator as a guide. This is a clever move because it allows us to sympathize with the narrator. Amir's choice to flashback the plot events of the story so each character's background develops does two things: it provides exposition and background, and it also reinforces the thematic idea that our past defines our present.

The Kite Runner was made into a movie in 2007.