Guilt and Redemption in Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner

Notions of sins and their corresponding atonement have permeated all through Khaled Hosseini’s incisive fiction The Kite runner as a main theme, exactly where in the novel, the protagonist Amir’s sin towards his father Baba and his greatest pal Hassan, as well as Baba’s sin towards his very best buddy Ali are respectively disclosed, and their attempts for the realization of self-redemption have price them at a considerably heavy cost. The sins, with each other with their consequent retributions and subsequent atonements, intertwine with 1 an additional to kind an everlasting karma cycle of morality. Inside this cycle, admittedly, most of Amir and Baba’s sacrifices for their remedies are hugely worthwhile as which have alleviated their interior torments and retrieved their moral conscience, whereas a particular proportion of the sacrifices are beneath worthiness as they violate the original intentions of atonement.

The moral cycle begins inside the elder generation, among Baba and Ali, who are respectively Amir’s father and Hassan’s nominal father. Because of Baba’s selfish want, he after had an affair with Ali’s wife and gave birth to Hassan. In order to maintain his nangs and namoos as a renowned figure, his hypocrisy had make him a thief which he detests the most, and deprived from Hassan his determine, from Ali’s honor. In order to atone his sin towards Ali and Hassan, he tends to make massive effort to hold them in his loved ones. He treats Ali as a close buddy with equal identity, regardless of their disparity in social hierarchy, and tried by all indicates to restore affinity with Hassan that a father and a son supposed to possess. When Ali decided to leave with Hassan due to Hassan’s mental problem, Amir saw Baba do one thing I had in no way observed him do before: he cried. The two-words truncated sentence, he cried, emphasizes not only the rarity of Baba’s crying, but also his cherishment and gratitude for Ali and Hassan’s sheer existence in his loved ones, because only if they keep with him can he atone for his delinquency. He says please to them in discomfort, in plea, in fear, the repetitive phrase with the anaphora of in again emphasize Baba’s desperation for their removal and his mental struggle for his atonement. The reality that Baba is unwilling to let Ali and Hassan leave to some extend proves that he regards his compensation for them is far more than worthy considering that it pacifies his sense of sinfulness and aids him obtain a mentally peaceful state. Moreover, right after Hassan heard of Baba’s death, he wore black for the subsequent forty days, where the numerical diction of forty days highlights Hassan’s respect and yearning for Baba. He signs that Agha Sahib was like my second father, with out realizing the truth, he nonetheless regards Baba as his father, this indicates that Baba’s effort has at some point won the affection and affinity of his son, which once again proves his atonement worthwhile.

Most focally, nonetheless, the tale devotes on depicting Amir’s grievous atonement for not standing up for Hassan when he was in danger but expelling him away from his family members as an alternative. Despite the fact that the process of his self-expiation is full of each physical and psychological anguish and agony, he nonetheless has not regret for the price he has paid. Extended ahead of Amir realizes that he must no longer become a man who can not stand up to something as in Baba’s comment, and that he ought to atone his guilt for Hassan by actual deeds, he has already subtly been undertaking his psychological atonement in the way of interior dilemma. When Amir discovers that his wife Soraya is unable to conceive a youngster, he deems that maybe one thing, an individual, somewhere, had decided to deny me fatherhood for the factors I had done., exactly where the repetitive alliteration beginning with some in his inner-monologue emphatically demonstrates that he infinitely believes the deprival of his fatherhood is a punishment for what his has carried out to Hassan. He deems himself deserved and culpable of the punishment, due to the fact only to atone for Hassan at the expense of his mental tranquility or even his right of becoming a father, he can relieve himself from the relentless guilt he feels for his very best pal. Moreover, when Amir determines to return to Kabul and rescue Hassan’s only kid Sohrab from the child abuser Assef, in order to fulfill his maximal expiation, he has a bloody fight with Assef which produced him scared with Ruptured spleen. Broken teeth. Punctured lung. Busted eye socket. Even though helping Sohrab to get rid of Assef has destructively broken his physical well being, he consciously neglects his sacrifice due to the fact when throughout Assef’s assault, for the first time since the winter of 1975, I felt at peace. The peace of acquiring revenge, the peace of compensating his sin, the peace of terminating the interior torment that he has been suffered for thirty years. To Amir, as lengthy as he could retrieve his moral tranquility, anything he has paid for the atonement is worthwhile. This explains why when Amir sees the first subtle smile of Sohrab right after his suicide try, he running with a swarm of screaming children, the high modality motion suggests his inner joyfulness and the ultimate liberation from the haunting previous, which against reveals the worthiness of his expensive atonement.

Nonetheless, to some extent, the sacrifice for atonement can be excessive compared to the sin. Amir’s mother hemorrhaged to death in the course of childbirth, which makes Amir an indirect murderer and a sinner to his father for killing his beloved wife. In order to atone himself in front of Baba, he determines to win the kite fighting tournament, and asked Hassan to run the last kite for him to satisfy Baba and fulfill his self-esteem. Since his eagerness for redeeming himself is so intense, that he at some point sacrifices Hassan through his non-action when seeing him acquiring sexually abused by Assef. On his way residence in victory, he thinks maybe Hassan was the cost I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay. The rhyming phrases emphasize his desperation for gaining Baba’s affection and atoning himself at all costs. This colossal sacrifice sooner or later leads to Amir’s extended-term psychological torment. Beyond the years his guiltiness haunts about him, floods into his dreams or even random thoughts. When Amir dreamt about the scene that Hassan had got slaughtered although himself was the man in the herringbone vest as the killer, after he experienced the impoverished situation of Farid’s household which created him envision the analogous adversity Hassan’s family members had gone through only due to his selfishness of unwilling to take them to American, as a result to disguise his crime. His internal struggle and turmoil has not been diluted but intensified over and over chronologically, which is represented by the flashbacks of his memory that disrupted the linear structure of the novel. Inside these flashbacks, the disastrous post-sacrifice consequence is revealed, which strongly rejected the worthiness of the great price of his atonement for Baba.

In Baba’s buddy Rahim Khan’s letter to Amir, he outlined the significance of atonement by defining the boundary of excellent and evil: a man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not endure. And apparently, Amir and Baba are inherently excellent in nature, therefore most of the time they deem their atonement worthy, in spite of of the massive sacrifice they created, as their treatments have restored their goodness and conscience and saved them from the sea of painful psyche. Nonetheless, karma is fugitive. At times blind sacrifice may possibly be counterproductive and brings about more irretrievable sins they need to atone. Yet it is the unforeseen cycle of sins and atonements that add suspense to the Amir, Hassan and Baba’s interweaving traces of lives, and to the novel Kite Runner as a whole.