Class Tensions in "The Kite Runner"
Class Tensions in “The Kite Runner” With receiving numerous awards on “The Kite Runner”, Khaled Hosseini has become an international best seller. With more than eight million copies sold world wide, Hosseini shares that the story was inspired by his childhood in Afghanistan. When moving to California with his family, Hosseini recalls the passages in the book of Amir and Baba as immigrants in the United States to be the most resembling of his life. Through the period of adjustment from living in an upper-middle class nieghbourhood with his father as a diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother who taught Farsi and history at a local high school for girls to welfare in the United States, Hosseini explains the tension grew between family members (KhaledHosseini.com). Though as years passed, Hosseini acknowledges the novel greatly relates to the relationships in his family that grew stronger due to the financial struggles his family had to overcome. “The Kite Runner” discusses the affects of wealth and poverty, in which creates emotional tension and develops relationships between the three characters of the novel; Amir, Hassan and Baba. The central character of the story as well its narrator, Amir has a privileged upbringing, which results in him being deprived of a deep emotional connection with his father, Baba. His father who is rich by Afghan standards, believes Baba wishes Amir was more like him and that Baba holds him responsible for his mother’s death during his birth: I always felt like Baba hated me a little. And why not? After all, I had killed his beloved wife, his beautiful princess, hadn’t I? The least I could have done was to have had the decency to have turned out a little more like him. But I hadn’t turned out like him. Not at all. (page 20)
As a young child, this creates a difficult relationship between Amir and his father. He does not understand that his father has been teaching him how to defend for himself in this
As a young child, this creates a difficult relationship between Amir and his father. He does not understand that his father has been teaching him how to defend for himself in this
Bibliography: Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. Canada: Random House of Canada Limited, 2003. “Biography on Khaled Hosseini”. Khaled Hosseini. 2009. December 3, 2010 .