Themes

Guilt

Identify three quotations in which Amir details the extent that guilt is a controlling force in his life. Explain how they present an idea about ‘guilt’. 

“I became what I am today at the age of twelve on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek.”

• This presents the idea of guilt because it shows that he has been thinking about and/or trying to forget or ignore the event since the winter of 1975, when he didn’t defend Hassan. He has been subconsciously looking back into that alleyway for 26 years and could never forget about it as it was eating him up inside for years on end. He never got his happy ending, even when he got rid of Hassan and sent him away, and then even when he and Baba moved away to America.

“There is a way to be good again.”

• Rahim Khan knows that Amir feels extremely guilty about what he didn’t do, and he told him through his guilt that he can get rid of it, that Rahim Khan had found a way for him to live in peace after all of these years. This sentence alone has multiple undertones of ‘you’re guilty’ but not in a blaming way, more in a way that says it like fact, “you’re guilty and you know it and there’s nothing that you can do about until now.”

“I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had.”

• Since this story is narrated through the whole thing and most of it is accounted like a story, Amir states that if he did speak up for Hassan and saved him, his whole life might have turned out differently. Maybe he wou;d have stayed friends with Hassan and never sent him away, maybe Hassan would have gone to America with them and he never would have died. And Amir would not have lived with the guild of not having stopped Hassan getting raped.

Comment on the ‘event’ that Amir is constantly referring to as being the thing that rules his life- do you believe he deserves to suffer like this? Why/why not? Why do you think the guilt from this one wrong action causes him to commit more ‘crimes’?

In a way of someone who has grown up knowing that standing back and doing nothing when you could have done something, I think he does deserve to suffer, but knowing that he is a little 12 year old boy that just wanted to please his father and make him love him and is scared of almost everything, then I can understand why he didn’t stand up for Hassan. He didn’t want to risk the kite, the only way that he could get his father’s approval and love. And also growing up with that mentality, that he had to do stuff to get his fathers approval, and since he just got what he needed to get that love, that was all that he was thinking about. And since he was a little boy, in that moment he wouldn’t have been thinking about the consequences either, just that moment and getting the kite, and nothing else. Maybe that was why he felt so guilty after, because he was trying to please that family he wanted to love him, and he neglected the family that he already had that loved him much much more, and he didn’t realise that until after and then the guilt started flooding his system and he couldn’t get rid of it.

Explain what happens when Amir attempts to run away from the guilt in his past. Why do you think he cannot escape it?

He cannot escape it because it was Hassan that got hurt, it was his brother, his friend.

“Then he would remind us that there was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break. 

Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. ”

If Amir tried to run away from his guilt it would just come back in another way, he tried to run and it ended up with him losing his best friend/brother and that made him even more guilty, and then when in America he still couldn’t confront his guilt and feelings.

Reflect on the presentation of ‘guilt’ in this text. What do you think the big things the author wants us to learn about the effects of guilt on living a normal life are?

If you don’t confront guilt then you can never get rid of it. Some people try to fix it and get redemption for their actions and then they can finally be free of what they did or are going to do or doing currently. Like Amir, if you run from guilt it follows you through life and you can never get rid of it until you face what you have done and forgiven yourself and gotten forgiveness from others.

Redemption

Amir’s journey to finding redemption makes up the very core of this novel. The whole tale revolves around the central figure first creating something he needs to be redeemed from, then attempting to live with the guilt of what he has done and finally embarking on a journey that he hopes will help him to atone for his past sins.

Redemption is the act of ‘making up’ or atoning for something that you have done. You can think of it as ‘clearing a debt’. This novel serves to show the readers how far you sometimes have to go in order to feel redeemed and that, in the end, you must be able to live with yourself. The only redemption that matters is what you allow yourself to feel.

Respond to the questions (which are in orange text) below to begin considering Amir’s journey to redemption:

We know that the ‘event’ that Amir refers to throughout the novel is the sexual assault on Hassan. We have established that this event drives the guilt that Amir feels for so long. During this alleyway scene, Amir is afraid that he will be beaten up by Assef and his friends. This scares him. Towards the end of the novel when Amir is trying to save Sohrab, he ends up fighting with Assef. He states that: “What was so funny was that, for the first time since the winter of 1975, I felt at peace. I laughed because I saw that, in some hidden nook in a corner of my mind, I’d even been looking forward to this…My body was broken- just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later- but I felt healed. Healed at last. I laughed.”

Explain why the fight scene allows Amir to feel healed. Why do you think he needed to endure physical pain and suffering in order to balance the scales?

Amir feels healed from getting beat up because this is the beating that he would have gotten if he did try and save Hassan, and it is the beating that he feels he deserves for not saving Hassan. It’s something that he thought he would have avoided when younger but he just got it is the future. Maybe it is symbolism for that guilt follows you and catches up with you at some point. It was his turning point for forgiving himself, and the punishment he didn’t get from Hassan at the tip of their hill with the pomegranates.

In the early stages of the book, we are told that Amir’s mother died after giving birth to him. We also get the impression that his father, Baba, has never forgiven him for this. Amir constantly strives to please his father, almost like he is trying to redeem himself in Baba’s eyes.

Describe how Amir believes he can redeem himself for Baba. Explain the reality of this after Amir achieves what he set out to. Why does it not work out?

He is a young boy that just wants his father to love him, and sadly that becomes one of his priorities in his life, leading him to betray Hassan and not stop him from getting raped. The reality of this after he wins the kite running tournament, is that he risked everything he could to get his fathers approval and love but you cannot buy love unfortunately, so when he did get love it wasn’t for very long. And I think that Baba did to some degree blame Amir for the death of his mother and then he was also dealing with the fact that Hassan was also his son but he couldn’t show it or give him love in the way that he wanted to, so he took that out on Amir who was the ligitimised version of what Hassan was.

Amir does well at hiding from his sins for 26 years. He builds a new life for himself in America, settling down with his wife. He constantly mentions never quite feeling settled or fully ‘at peace’. Then Rahim Khan calls and tells him that there “is a way to be good again”.

Why do you think Amir responds to this phone call the way that he does? He has lived with his sin for 26 years. Why do you think he tries to redeem himself now?

All those 26 years he was running away from his pain/guilt and in doing do thinking that he couldn’t redeem himself because there was no way, so when he hears the phone call saying that there’s a way for him to be good, to feel good, again, he take that chance because I think by that point he was just done with living with his sin. So I think that is why he chose to try and redeem himself then and not years before, because now he has a solution presented to him and he doesn’t have to wait for something else to come up and save him. This phone call from Rahim Khan saved him from him drowning in his own guilt, also growing because he wasn’t doing anything about it for years on end and now he has a way of getting rid of that. Which in itself is slightly self centered again, but also in a way that he can honour Hassan in a way that he could never before.

Redemption is one of the most complex of human experiences. It cannot exist without guilt establishing itself first. Keeping in mind that realism exists to explore the reality of human experience. 

Discuss what Hosseini is trying to teach the reader about in this novel. What messages/lessons/warnings does he give to the reader about the guilt/redemption cycle? What should we take away from Amir’s story?

Amir lives with guilt unacknowledged and it grows healthily. So maybe the author is saying that to live with guilt you run the risk of living with a parasite that will just drain you and keep you from doing something you might have been able to do all along but never thought you deserved it or you just couldn’t bring yourself to do it, in this case Amir started up a run down hospital in Afghanistan and he could never have done that with the guilt weighing him down, cause now he’s repaying for what he has done, he’s had his punishment and redemption arch and now he’s making his and others life better for it.

Bonus Discussion Question

You do not need to write an answer to this if you do not wish to but it is something we will discuss in our Hangout chat later this week:

Do you believe that Amir redeems himself? Does he make up for abandoning Hassan and driving him away from home all those years ago?

I think that was painful for Amir as well as Hassan, not as much as that even would be terrifyingly traumatic for Hassan, but Amir was also affected horribly. He was only young and you could use the argument that he was just a kid and he didn’t know how much the consequences were going to affect him and everyone else. And with how he basically saves Hassan’s reincarnation (son, Sohrab), and that he takes him home and then revitalizes him as much as he can when they get back to America. And then when he starts off the hospital, he unlocked the potential that he didn’t know that he had when he was tied down by guilt.