(no subject)
Nealy Ann Bowden
English Essay
How many lives have you destroyed? Just, you know, if you had to make an estimate, how many people would you say you have changed forever, for the worse? One? Three? Zero? Hopefully your answer is zero. Hopefully my answer is zero. But, how can we be sure? If you say you have affected none, how do you know you have not affected one or two, by accident. If you know you have affected one, how do you know that you didn’t affect four or five at the end of the day? And, if you did find out how many people you have ruined, how would you handle that guilt?
In The Kite Runner, our narrator finds out, at a very young age, just how horrible it feels to know you’ve changed a life for the worse. It is not until decades later that he learns what immense repercussions his one bad decision had, and how many lives he actually changed. The idea that one decision can change the lives of many people forever is something in this book that hit me very hard.
This idea of irreparable change, and the trickledown affect it can have on others is not one that pertains solely to The Kite Runner. This theme has found its place among many other pieces of important literature. Take The Scarlet Letter, for example. In that piece, Hester Prynne made one mistake that changed the rest of her life. Not only did it change her life, but also the life of her daughter, an innocent child, like Sohrab. The repercussions of what happened, in her case, do not stop there. In this book we also watch Dimmesdale suffer an internal pain for what he has done. Now, I’m not here to argue over whether or not the pain of these three people was a just punishment for what two of them did, because that would get us nowhere. What I am trying to do is point out how similar these two books are. In both cases, we know and understand the pain of the guilty party. Also, in both cases, we don’t necessarily see the full affects of the guilty parties until the very end of the book. That is when the reader realizes how much change can be brought about by one simple action.
As you see, the idea of irreparable change and regret is not something The Kite Runner introduced to literature. The same message has been told a thousand times before, even the story of Adam and Eve pertains to the same idea. The fact that this idea is not a new one did not, amazingly enough, take away from how hard this idea hit me when I read The Kite Runner.
I think that as long as I live this idea will be one that really gets to me, I guess because being unable to fix something is very scary. The idea that Amir, no matter how hard he tried, could not fix things, and could not change his past, is one that frightens me. One bad day can lead to one bad life, or many bad lives, and that is a scary, constricting thought. That is why Amir’s struggle with guilt and change, and one or two mistakes, really got to me. After all, Amir was not a bad person, he was just a boy who messed up and a man who tried to fix it. That is what struck me the hardest.
6 - I think that Amir cannot confess to Soraya what he has done because confessing it would make it true. When he does not have to talk about it and address it, he can almost convince himself that it did not happen, or was not a big deal. The moment that he admits what he has done to someone, he is open to their reaction and their reaction could be a bad one. If he had told Soraya and she had left him, or told him what he had done was wrong, it would solidify that what he had done was wrong, and he would be obligated to feel guilty.
7 - I think it is significant that Amir and Soraya have “Unexplained Infertility” because it makes it seem like adopting Sohrab was just something that was mean to happen. It gives a sort of ironic twist to the end of the book. It is as if Hassan has done one more deed for Amir, and that is giving him a son when he could not have one.
8 - Soraya and Amir actually have similar relationships to their fathers. They both have a little bit of tension between them. Also, they both seem to want a better relationship with their father, but feel that things that have happened in the past (for Soraya the time that she ran away, and for Amir basically anytime from his birth, when his mother died, on) prohibit that from happening. Their upbringings affected their relationships with their fathers because they both feel governed by their pasts. They both seem to feel that their fathers are judging them by their pasts, and perhaps they are.
9 - The Afghan immigrants try to hold on to their culture by having outings together where they celebrate tradition. Flying the kites together, kite running, having cook outs with traditional food and music, all of these things are parts of their culture they are holding onto. They try to assimilate by becoming more Americanized, they do the flea market thing and have their own jobs with all different kinds of people. While they celebrate their culture, they don’t just stay with other Afghans, they mix in with different kinds of people.
10 - I think Amir tries to forget about his life in Afghanistan by focusing on his life in the U.S. His method of escape is to simply foget, but he does not succeed and his guilt stays with him. Also, Rahim Khan wouldn’t let him forget even if he could.