The Kite Runner

About The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini published The Kite Runner in 2003, and it became one of the most widely read novels of the decade. It is a book about Afghanistan before and after the Soviet invasion, about the Taliban, and about the Afghan diaspora in California. It is also, underneath all of that, a book about a boy who did nothing when he should have done something, and who spent the rest of his life trying to become a person who deserved to be forgiven.

The novel is Hosseini’s first, and it is imperfect in some of the ways that first novels are: occasionally melodramatic, willing to arrange plot events too neatly for thematic effect. But the emotional honesty at its core is real and the Afghan world it describes, the kite-fighting winters of Kabul in the 1970s and the shattering transformations that followed, is rendered with the precision of a writer working from genuine memory and genuine grief. The book made many Western readers aware of Afghanistan as a place with a complex, beautiful, and now-devastated culture rather than simply a location for geopolitical events.

What makes the book stick is the simplicity of Amir’s original failure. He watches something terrible happen to Hassan, his best friend and his father’s servant’s son, and he does not intervene. He tells himself that he had reasons. He tells himself that Hassan would have done the same in his position. The novel is an argument against both of those excuses, sustained over thirty years of story.

Plot Summary

Amir grows up in Kabul in the 1970s, the pampered son of Baba, a wealthy and respected Pashtun merchant. His best friend is Hassan, the son of their Hazara servant Ali. Hassan is loyal to Amir in a way that is absolute and unquestioning; he would do anything for him. Amir is fond of Hassan but also, at times, resentful of the qualities in Hassan that he himself lacks: physical courage, simple goodness, the ability to face things directly.

During a kite-fighting tournament, Amir runs the last kite he has cut down, a prize that would earn him Baba’s approval. Hassan retrieves it for him, saying “For you, a thousand times over.” In an alley, Assef, a vicious older boy, corners Hassan and assaults him. Amir watches from around the corner. He does not step in. He turns and walks away. He keeps the kite. He gets his father’s approval. He never tells anyone what happened.

In 1981, following the Soviet invasion, Baba loads Amir into a truck and they flee Afghanistan. They make their way to Fremont, California, where Baba works at a gas station and Amir finishes high school and then college and then publishes a novel. He meets and marries Soraya, a woman from an Afghan émigré family. Baba develops lung cancer and dies before the first grandchild is born. Years pass. The guilt about Hassan does not.

A call from Rahim Khan, Baba’s old friend, brings Amir back to Pakistan. Rahim Khan tells him that Hassan and his wife were shot by the Taliban, and that Hassan’s son Sohrab is in an orphanage in Kabul. He tells him one more thing: that Hassan was Baba’s son, which means that the boy Amir watched be assaulted was his half-brother. Amir goes to Kabul, now a city of rubble and checkpoints. He finds that Sohrab has been taken by a Taliban official. The Taliban official turns out to be Assef.

Amir fights Assef and is beaten badly before Sohrab, who has a slingshot, puts out Assef’s eye. They get out. Amir brings Sohrab to America. The boy is traumatized and nearly silent, but at the end of the novel, at a kite-flying event in Fremont, Amir runs a kite for Sohrab and says his brother’s words back to him: “For you, a thousand times over.” Sohrab almost smiles. It is the smallest possible beginning.

Key Themes

Redemption and Whether It Is Ever Possible

The novel’s central question is whether Amir can be redeemed for what he did and did not do in that alley in Kabul when he was twelve years old. Hosseini’s answer is not quite yes and not quite no. Amir does everything he can: he goes back to Afghanistan at personal risk, he fights Assef, he brings Sohrab home, he gives the boy everything he has. And Sohrab’s near-smile at the end is carefully calibrated. It is not forgiveness. It is not recovery. It is the possibility that something might eventually grow. The book argues that redemption is real but that it is not a destination you arrive at. It is a practice you take up, indefinitely.

Guilt and Memory

Amir’s guilt is the engine of the novel. He moves to a different country, builds a new life, marries, writes books, and the guilt is always there. He flinches when he sees kites. He cannot tell his wife about what he did. He lies awake thinking about Hassan. Hosseini is interested in the way that a single failure can organize a whole life, not because the person cannot move past it but because moving past it requires first going back through it. Amir spends twenty-six years doing everything except the one thing that might actually help, which is returning to the place where the failure happened.

Friendship Across Hierarchies

The friendship between Amir and Hassan is complicated from the beginning by the fact that they are not equals. Amir is Pashtun and the son of the house; Hassan is Hazara and the son of the servant. In Afghan society in the 1970s, as Hosseini describes it, these distinctions matter enormously and shape everything. Hassan’s loyalty to Amir is partly genuine and partly the only available mode for a boy in his position. Amir’s resentment of Hassan is partly personal and partly a product of a class system that puts him above Hassan while letting him feel inferior to Hassan’s better qualities. The friendship is real, and it is also a product of inequality, and both things are true simultaneously.

Afghanistan Before and After

The novel is partly an elegy for a Kabul that no longer exists: the kite-fighting tournaments, the pomegranate trees, the movie theaters, the schools. Hosseini renders that world carefully and lovingly before destroying it, and the destruction is not background to the story. It is part of the story. The Taliban who murder Hassan and keep Sohrab captive are not a force from outside the world of the novel. They are what that world became. The personal story of Amir’s guilt and attempted redemption is inseparable from the political and historical story of what happened to Afghanistan.

Identity and Belonging

Amir lives in two worlds and belongs fully to neither. In California he is an Afghan, explaining his country to people who have never heard of it, maintaining traditions his American-born neighbors find strange. In Afghanistan he is a stranger, unable to recognize the streets of the city he grew up in, identified as a foreigner by his clothes and accent. His wife Soraya is caught in a similar double life. Hosseini is describing the specific condition of the immigrant who left before they chose to leave, whose homeland was altered beyond recognition by forces outside their control, and who carries a version of the country that exists only in memory.

Meet the Characters

Amir is one of fiction’s more uncomfortable protagonists because he is genuinely flawed in ways that are hard to excuse and easy to understand. He is not a bad person. He is a person who, at a crucial moment, failed to be the person he should have been, and who then spent decades constructing elaborate self-justifications. Talking to Amir on Novelium means talking to someone in the middle of that process: not yet at the end, not yet redeemed, still working out what he owes and whether it is possible to pay it. Users can talk to him on Novelium at any point in that arc.

Hassan is the moral center of the book and the character whose goodness everyone else is measured against. He is loyal, physically courageous, incapable of holding grudges, and entirely without the class resentment that his situation might reasonably produce. Hosseini is careful not to make him a saint; he is a specific person with specific joys and specific pain. On Novelium, talking to Hassan means encountering the kind of uncomplicated goodness that the novel’s other characters find difficult to be around, because it makes their own compromises visible.

Baba is one of the most interesting fathers in contemporary fiction, and not because he is admirable. He has genuine virtues: courage, generosity, a refusal to be dishonest. He also has a secret that rewrites everything Amir thinks he knows about him. On Novelium, users can talk to Baba before and after the revelation, and the conversation will be different depending on which Baba you are talking to: the one who is a legend to his son, or the one who was something more complicated.

Assef is the novel’s villain, and he is the kind of villain who believes in his own ideology, which makes him more frightening than the kind who is simply cruel. He is a bully in childhood and a Taliban official in adulthood, and the ideological continuity between those two phases is part of Hosseini’s point. Users can talk to him on Novelium in the mode of confronting the kind of conviction that produces atrocity, which is a harder and more valuable conversation than simply confronting evil.

Rahim Khan is Baba’s oldest friend and, in some ways, Amir’s truest confidant. He is the one who encouraged Amir’s writing when Baba was disappointed by it, and he is the one who eventually tells Amir the truth about Hassan. He is a man of great sensitivity who also waited too long to say the things that needed to be said. On Novelium, talking to Rahim Khan means talking to someone who understands the situation with more clarity than anyone else and who is trying to make right what he allowed to go wrong.

Sohrab is Hassan’s son and Baba’s grandson, and by the time Amir finds him he has been through experiences that no child should survive. He is nearly silent, traumatized, and deeply distrustful of adults who say they will take care of him. His near-smile at the end of the novel is one of the most carefully earned moments in the book. On Novelium, talking to Sohrab means talking to a child who is trying to decide whether it is safe to trust the world again, and the conversation will depend on whether you give him reason to.

Why Talk to Characters from The Kite Runner?

The Kite Runner covers thirty years of a man’s life and, compressed into its pages, dozens of conversations and moments that the narrative can only summarize. The actual conversation in which Rahim Khan tells Amir the truth about Hassan. The night Amir and Baba drove out of Kabul. The years Sohrab spent in the orphanage before anyone came to find him. These are things the novel gestures at but cannot fully render.

When you talk to book characters from The Kite Runner on Novelium, you have access to the interior of those gaps. You can talk to Hassan on the day before everything changed. You can talk to Sohrab during the long silence he maintained after coming to America. You can ask Baba what he was thinking when he kept his secret for all those years. The voice conversations on Novelium do not replace the novel’s narrative. They extend it into the space where the novel points but cannot follow.

The book is about the things people do not say and the conversations they do not have. Novelium is the place where those conversations can happen.

About the Author

Khaled Hosseini was born in 1965 in Kabul, Afghanistan. His father was a diplomat and his mother taught Farsi and history. When Hosseini was eleven, his family moved to France on a diplomatic posting. The Soviet invasion prevented their return. They requested asylum in the United States in 1980. Hosseini grew up in San Jose, California, went to medical school, and practiced medicine for years while writing The Kite Runner in the early mornings before his shifts.

The novel was published in 2003 and was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, published in 2007, approached Afghanistan’s history from the perspective of two Afghan women. A third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, followed in 2013. He founded the Khaled Hosseini Foundation to provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. He is currently a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The world he described in The Kite Runner, the peaceful Kabul of pomegranate trees and kite tournaments, is a place he never got to return to as the person he became.