A NEW CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF KHALED HOSSENIE’S THE KITE RUNNER E-Book

MUBASHAR ALTAF

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

It is a new critical analysis of Khaled Hosseini's masterwork, The Kite Runner. It provides a complete social, cultural, historical, and political background of the novel. it facilitates the readers of Khaled Hosseini. in this new analysis, the text of The Kite Runner has been evaluated from multiple dimensions. It explores the novel. it sheds light on different angles of Khaled Hosseini’s craft and art of fiction writing. It analyses the plot structure, characters, and culture of Afghanistan. It is a satiated and comprehensive study of the novel, The Kite Runner

This book guides you about Afghanistan’s culture

This work helps you to understand the historical and cultural context of The Kite Runner

This analysis provides you an understanding of the text and context of The Kite Runner

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Leseprobe

MUBASHAR ALTAF

A NEW CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF KHALED HOSSENIE’S THE KITE RUNNER

the book is dedicated to OSCAR WILDE, whose writings always give me pleasure BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 01: INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 02: HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE KITE RUNNER

CHAPTER 03: THE KITE RUNNER & AFGHAN CULTURE

CHAPTER 04: THE PLOT OF THE NOVEL

CHAPTER 05: CHARACTERS IN THE NOVEL

CHAPTER 06: THE KITE RUNNER FILM

CHAPTER 07: KEY LITERARY ELEMENTS

CHAPTER 08: ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN AFGHANISTAN

CHAPTER 09: POLITICAL CONTEXT OF THE NOVEL

CHAPTER 10: CULTURAL CONTEXT OF THE NOVEL

CHAPTER 11: JOURNEY OF AAMIR, THE PROTAGONIST

CHAPTER 12: THE RETURN OF HUMANITY

CHAPTER 13: HOW TO BE GOOD AGAIN

CHAPTER 14: THE DEFORMED FAMILY ETHICS

CHAPTER 15: ETHNIC AND ETHICAL ORDER OF INEQUALITY

CHAPTER 16: A NARROW RELIGIOUS ORDER

CHAPTER 17: THE KITE RUNNER AS A TRAUMA FICTION

CHAPTER 18: THE ISSUE OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION

CHAPTER 19: ANALYSIS OF CONFLICTS IN KHALED HOSSEINI’S THE KITE RUNNER

CHAPTER 20: THE IMAGE OF ISLAM IN THE TEXT

CHAPTER 21: SOCIO-POLITICAL ARENA: AN UNENDING TERROR

CHAPTER 22: THE ISSUE OF CULTURE & IDENTITY

CHAPTER 23: STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE NOVEL

CHAPTER 24: A SOCIO-POLITICAL STRUCTURE & THE KITE RUNNER

CHAPTER 25: THE KITE RUNNER AS A MULTICULTURAL NOVEL

CHAPTER 26: THE KITE RUNNER: AN AMERICAL PERSPECTIVE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PREFACE

 PREFACE

Khaled Hosseini is one of my favorite storytellers. I read all of his books again and again. When I was doing MPhil in English, I chose Khaled Hosseini for my thesis project. After completing my thesis on The Kite Runner, I decided to start a new project on the very book. Because my thesis was about the narrative structure and that was a kind of structural study. Therefore I longed to analyze the content of this wonderful work of fiction, critically and from multi-dimensions. So I harked upon this uphill journey and now finally I reached the destination in the form of this book. So it is the byproduct of my thesis. I hope every learner and reader of The Kite Runner will enjoy and appreciate the work. 

Mubashar Altaf,

[email protected]

16 January 2021

Chapter 01 : INTRODUCTION

Chapter 01

INTRODUCTION

THE KITE RUNNER

The Kite Runner is an inspiring and powerful novel about a Pashtun named Amir who looks back on his life during his transition from childhood into adulthood. Amir grew up in a lavish and rich district of Kabul, Afghanistan. His father was a well-known and respected man, but Amir struggled to live up to his father's standards and always craved his love and attention. Ali and his son Hassan (Amir's best friend), are both loyal servants to Baba and Amir but are of the minority Hazara ethnicity who are not respected in Afghanistan. Hassan demonstrated his devoted loyalty to Amir by constantly sticking up for him over the years. Amir and Hassan's relationship was forever changed after a frigid winter day in the year 1975 when Amir was only 12 years old. Amir and Hassan took part in an annual kite-fighting tournament and won for the first time. Hassan, being the loyal friend he is, went running for the kite to retrieve it for Amir exclaiming that he would "a thousand times over". After Hassan did not return, Amir went looking for him and found him cornered in an alley by Assef - a sociopathic bully. Amir witnessed Assef raped Hassan, in front of his very own eyes but was too cowardly to rescue him resulting in a life full of guilt and regret.     In 1981, 6 years after the kite running incident, Amir and Baba fled to California after the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Over several years, Amir created a successful life for himself by graduating from university, becoming a professional writer, and marrying his dream wife, Soraya. Shortly after all of Amir's success, he received a phone call from Rahim Khan, a man who was more of a father to him than his own while growing up in Kabul. Rahim Kahn told Amir of Baba's biggest secret - which Hassan is actually Baba's son and Amir's half-brother. He reveals that both Hassan and his wife were brutally murdered by the Taliban. He told him, "There is a way to be good again". Amir chooses to risk his safe and successful life in America to travel back to war-stricken Afghanistan in order to rescue Hassan's orphan son, Sohrab, in an attempt to relieve his lifelong guilt and to obtain redemption for his past.

KHALED HOSSEINI

On this day in 1965, Khaled Hosseini, author of the best-selling novel “The Kite Runner,” is born in Kabul, Afghanistan. Hosseini’s semiautobiographical book was credited with helping to educate Western readers about Afghanistan, a country many of them knew little about.

As a child, Hosseini, the oldest of five siblings, lived in Afghanistan and Tehran, Iran, before moving with his family to Paris, France, in 1976 when his diplomat father was posted there by the Afghan Foreign Ministry. In 1980, the family, unable to return to their homeland, which had been invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979, was granted political asylum in America. They settled in San Jose, California, where Hosseini learned English at high school. In 1988, he graduated from Santa Clara University with a biology degree and went on to earn a medical degree from the University of California-San Diego in 1993.

In the spring of 2001, while practicing internal medicine in California, Hosseini began writing “The Kite Runner,” the coming-of-age story of two Afghan boys in Kabul, one from a privileged background and the other a servant’s son. The novel is set against several decades of Afghan history, including the fall of the monarchy in 1973, the Soviet invasion, and the rise of the Taliban regime in the 1990s, which was toppled by a U.S.-led invasion following September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

Hosseini, who had no formal training as an author, has credited his native country’s strong tradition of oral storytelling as an influence on his writing style. “The Kite Runner” was published in 2003, and eventually became an international best-seller. The novel has been translated into more than 40 languages, and a big-screen adaptation was released in 2007. subsequently, Hosseini published his second & third novels, “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” & “ And The Mountains Echoed “which also became the best-sellers. Sea Prayer, an illustrated story is his last work published in 2018.

With the success of his writing career, Hosseini, who gave up practicing medicine in 2004, established a foundation to provide humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people.

AFGHANISTAN

Mountstuart Elphinstone was one of the British officers from the East India Company who visited Afghanistan in pursuit of the Afghan Emir’s court in 1809. He made an account of his trip to the country wherein he described Kabul as “the views up the east and west walls were beautiful, and each was closed by high mountains; but that of the space which runs from north to south, far surpassed everything that I have seen in an Asiatic garden. The fountains were sparkling with the sun, whose rays shone brightly on the trees, shrubs, and flowers on one side, and made a fine contrast with the deep shade of the other” (Elphinstone, 1815). But the history of the country validates that no political power had a successful regime without the support and cooperation of the local tribes.

RECEPTION OF THE NOVEL

The Kite Runner received the South African Boeke Prize in 2004. It was the first bestseller for 2005 in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan. It was also voted the Reading Group Book of the Year for 2006 and 2007 and headed a list of 60 titles submitted by entrants to the Penguin/Orange Reading Group prize (UK).8 In addition to the film adaptation, the novel was also adapted to the stage by Bay Area playwright Matthew Spangler. The Kite Runner was given its southwest premiere on stage at the Arizona Theatre Company in September-October of 2009.

CONTROVERSIES

The Kite Runner has been accused of hindering Western understanding of the Taliban by portraying Taliban members as representatives of various Western myths of evil. The American Library Association reports that The Kite Runner is one of its most-challenged books of 2008, with multiple attempts to remove it from libraries due to "offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group".

Chapter 02 HISTORIOGRAPHY IN FICTION

Chapter 02

HISTORIOGRAPHY IN FICTION

Over 5 million Afghans relinquished their homes and went into ousting in different nations and near 1.5 million lost their lives. The Afghan diaspora was a noteworthy point as of late as a result of the tremendous number of individuals escaping the relentless wars in their nation of origin. A war of "All against All" one against the "Other" was occurring between individuals who are distinct yet live in the same geological zone.

The Kite Runner is a flawlessly created novel set in a nation that is being decimated. The novel specifically connects its plot to the Afghan history, geology, ethnic gatherings, the Soviet invasion, the ascent of the Taliban, 9/11, and the US intrusion. It traverses the period from before the 1979 Soviet intrusion until the point when the remaking following the fall of the Taliban. The book evokes Afghans as free and pleased individuals, who for a considerable length of time have safeguarded their nation against one intruder after another. Hosseini bewilders whether the West will ever rise above the tribalism that it proceeds to undermine Afghanistan's history.

To disentangle the obscured, yet noticeable side of Afghanistan's life, culture, battles, traditions, conventions, expectations, and potential outcomes, Hosseini narrates the contrasting yet concurrent adventures of his characters. Amir is the first-person narrator of the text who recalls these events from his past, how his whole life changed amid the winters of 1975. If we ponder upon Amir’s life in chronological order from when he was just a child of 12 years to his and Baba’s migration when he was 18, to his life in California and his return to Afghanistan in 2001, we wade through Afghanistan’s cultural and political history just before the turning of affairs. Amir relates “in 1933, the year Baba was born and the year Zahir Shah began his forty-year reign of Afghanistan” (p.25) to describe the historical background. Later on in the text, Amir comments about the state of the country wherein the new generation would have to get accustomed to the cacophony of the cries and war.

“We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born. Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended. Our way of life. If not quite yet, then at least it was the beginning of the end. The end, the official end, would come first in April 1978 with the communist coup d'état, and then in December 1979, when Russian tanks would roll into the very same streets where Hassan and I played, bringing the death of Afghanistan I knew and marking the start of a still ongoing era of bloodletting.” (p.34)

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In 1919, Afghanistan regains independence after the third war against British forces trying to bring the country under their sphere of influence. General Mohammed Daud becomes prime minister in 1953. He turns to the Soviet Union for economic and military assistance. In 1978, General Daud is overthrown and killed in a coup by the leftist People’s Democratic Party. It leads to the power struggle between leftist leaders Hafizullah Amin and Nur Mohammed Taraki won by Amin. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to help remove Amin, who is executed. Babrak Karmal, leader of the People’s Democratic Party Parcham faction is installed as ruler backed by Soviet troops. Various mujahideen troops fight Soviet forces. US, Pakistan, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia supply money and arms. The US begins supplying mujahideen with Stinger missiles, enabling them to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships. Babrak Karmal was replaced by Najibullah. The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan completely in 1989, but civil war continued as mujahideen push to overthrow Najibullah. In 1993, Mujahedeen factions agreed on the formation of a government with ethnic Tajik and proclaimed Burhanuddin Rabbani as the president. Factional contests were continued. Pashtun-dominated Taliban emerged as a major challenge to the Rabbani government. In 1996, the Taliban seized control of Kabul and introduced the hardline version of Islam. Rabbani flees to join an anti-Taliban northern alliance. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia recognized the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan. Most other countries continue to regard Rabbani as head of state. In 1999, the United Nations imposed an air embargo and financial sanctions to force Afghanistan to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial. The World Trade Centre in the US attacked on September 11, 2001. Within one month the US and Britain launched airstrikes against Afghanistan after the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden. Taliban rule ended in November 2001. Hamid Karzai became the president of Afghanistan in 2004 14.

Chapter 03 THE KITE RUNNER & AFGHAN CULTURE

Chapter 03

THE KITE RUNNER & AFGHAN CULTURE

Afghan literature is rich in the literary tradition. The ancient art of storytelling continues to flourish in Afghanistan. They tell Folklores which concerns Afghans' life, tradition, values, beliefs, and behaviors. Classical poetry and plays are playing a very important role in Afghan culture. Most of the Afghan peoples are uneducated and cannot read and write so Folklore and Legends are told through the medium of songs and storytelling. In this novel, the writer also depicts this cultural tradition through Amir and Hassan. Hassan is uneducated but Amir goes to school. He used to tell his own written stories to Hassan. Amir and Hassan like poetry and other literature work like epics. Amir usually told him the story of Shahnamah which is the 10th century epic of ancient Persian heroes. Hassan likes it very much even on his birthday he demands to listen to a story from this epic. “He likes it all the chapters, the shahs of old, Feridoun, Zal, and Rudabeh. But his favorite story and mine were “Rostam and Sohrab” the great warrior Rostam…” (Hosseini 27). Hassan was so crazy about this story and he named his son Sohrab from this story’s name. Amir also writes his own stories and becomes a great novelist in America. He can write his first story in 30 minutes.