Relationship and Meaning in the Kite Runner
America acts as a place for Amir to bury his memories and a place for Baba to mourn his. In America, there are "homes that made Baba's house in Wazir Akbar Khan look like a servant's hut." What is ironic about this statement? What is the function of irony in this novel?
The Kite Runner is a novel of irony, the irony about a particular kind of immigrant experience in America, the experience of Afghani Muslim-Americans. On one hand, immigrants usually come to America to better their economic lot. Traditionally, the images of America are those of streets paved with gold, boulevards crammed to the brim with opportunities for new immigrants. However, the only reason the Afghani natives of Khaled Hosseini's novel flee to the United States is to escape the new regime in their country, the theocratic, anti-Western, and anti-capitalist Taliban leadership. Before this institution of a theocracy in Afghanistan, the narrator's family was extremely well off in comparison to their neighbors. The family's immigration to the United States meant a terrible reduction in their economic and social status. Before, Amir and his father Baba were the wealthy men of the town, in a poor...
Hassan was Amir's 'kite runner' when he was twelve. Then, Amir participated in a freewheeling kite competition, a lawless Afghani competition of no rules, much like the land of the United States. But kite flying is also a competition of circular movement much like the novel and much of Afghani traditional life. During one of these competitions, Hassan was killed and Amir fled.
Ironically, the reduction in the narrator's status from life as a boy to his initial life in the United States -- to the status of a servant, the quote implies -- has freed Amir from the haunting location of the first, framing scene of the novel, where "the past claws its way out," in defiance of his attempts to forget it. Temporarily, America provides a place for Amir to forget his past. (1)
However, the images of kites haunt the narrator as they flit in the sky as he sits on a bench at the beginning of the novel, after he has been shaken by a phone call from a voice from his past. Amir can never quite forget his…
