Amir Is a Young Boy

Amir is a young boy in Khaled Hosseini's Kite Runner who is traumatized by a childhood experience that leaves him under a constant shadow of shame and guilt. If he cannot admit the truth to himself which is his inability to protect himself, he is certainly not the only one suffering from the same problem. Hasan, who is the actual victim, cannot admit to himself that he has been a victim and continues to act normal as if nothing really happened. He loves and respects Amir from the core of his heart and even after the incident; he continues to love him with the same devotion. This is one thing that causes even more guilt for Amir who is cognitively too young to admit his guilt or to comprehend the incident in its grave complexity. Apart from Amir and Hasan who are both lying to themselves in their own way, their father, Baba is also another person who has been unable to expose the truth. He loves Hasan because he is his real son, born out of wedlock. He slept with Hasan's mother who was a maid and instead of accepting the truth of the situation, he allows Hasan to be brought up by a poor man who works at their place. He never tells Hasan that he is his own son and hides the truth from everyone except those who already know like the man who brought him up. "I had been the entitled half, the society-approved, legitimate half, the unwitting embodiment of Baba's guilt. I looked at Hassan, showing those two missing front teeth, sunlight slanting on his face. Baba's other half. The un-entitled, under-privileged half. The half who had inherited what had been pure and noble in Baba. The half that, maybe, in the most secret recesses of his heart, Baba had thought of as his true son." p.359 Though Baba takes good care of Hasan, he is unable to accept the truth in front of the whole world. Their individual guilt and shame that forced them to hide the truth took its toll on their souls. They were never able to fully embrace the world with all its beauty and vibrancy. There was always a part of them that was hidden and lurking in the shadows.

Childhood experiences have a tremendous impact on our personalities and our futures especially if these experiences were unpleasant, we can detect something dysfunctional about the person's adult life. In the book, we notice that as Amir grows up, he is very quiet and looks lost in his own world. The burden of his childhood is bearing on him heavily and he is unable to be as happy and complete as he would have otherwise been. All his adult life, he is burdened by the guilt of not being able to protect his friend when he could have. He seeks redemption and forgiveness and it is only when he finally achieves it that his soul feels happy again. Hasan on the other hand is an obscure figure in the book. We do not know much about his adult life except that he got married and bore a son, and then died at a relatively young age. Could his death be tied to his traumatized past? We cannot really tell. But we can assume that since he was the actual victim of the incident, he might have had to suffer too. Not only was he a victim at the hand of a bunch of rowdy street kids, he was also abandoned by his father and his best friend. That was something very cruel for a young boy to handle. That must have taken its toll on him and he finally gave up on life. When Rahim Khan tells Amir, "There is a way to be good again" (p. 1) we realize that redemption is the most important theme of this book. Childhood and what happened during that period have had a powerful impact on Amir's adult life; he is unable to forget anything about that incident and where that happened: "I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years." The sense of having betrayed a good friend, the shame and guilt that it had produced, continued to grow stronger over the years instead of gradually diminishing. This is what prompts Amir to go back to Afghanistan and save Sohrab (Hasan's son) simply to redeem himself and to wash off his guilt for once and all.