Thousand Splendid Suns
Character's Physical Traits

The main character of the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns is a woman named Mariam. She is a harami, or illegitimate child and thus has very little rights in her society. The very first description the reader gets of Mariam is when she is five years old, the first lines of the book. "Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami" (Hosseini 1). Very little information is given about her physically and this is also important. She is described as a weed, something ugly and undesired (329). The reason is that in her society, Mariam is highly unimportant as a single person. She is a woman and that means she is powerless. She is illegitimate which means that any power she may have had as a respectable woman is robbed her by the circumstances of her birth. Mariam's father abandons…...

Khaled Hosseini's novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, one of the protagonists, Mariam, is perceived as an "illegitimate" child because Jalil does not publically admit that he is her father. Similarly, the relationship between Mariam's mother and Jalil is considered "illegitimate" because she is of a low social class standing and unable to become one of Jalil's many wives. Mariam's "illegitimacy" as a human being haunts her for the rest of her life. She is of an already low socio-economic status, and her being labeled as illegitimate makes Mariam even more of a social outcast. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khalid Hosseini argues that legitimacy is completely arbitrary, and the only legitimate acts or statuses are moral ones.
For example, the society that shuns Mariam throughout her life is a society that can be considered morally illegitimate. Mariam's father has several wives and several children with those other wives. There is…...

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References

Hosseini, K. (2007). A Thousand Splendid Suns. Riverhead.

The Widow and Miss Watson see nothing wrong with slavery in modern society, while Huck actually takes actions to end slavery by leading Jim to freedom and treating Jim like a human being.
6. "To be or not to be, that is the bare bodkin."

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Signet, 2002, p. 143.

The Shakespearean 'actors' Jim and Huck befriend are really charlatans, despite their pretence of learning. They cannot even quote William Shakespeare's Hamlet in his "To be or not to be" soliloquy correctly.

7. "He says anyone who doesn't understand the theorems of Euclid is an idiot."

McCourt, Frank. Angela's Ashes. New York: Scribner, 1999, p.151.

The references to Euclid show the disparity between what is taught in Frank's school by an ambitious teacher and the poverty and ignorance of the rest of the boy's life. It also shows the narrow-mindedness of the principal, who is horrified that young boys…...