Kite Runner Hosseini, Khaled. The Term Paper

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"People sipping lattes at Starbucks were talking about the battle for Kunduz, the Taliban's last stronghold in the north," but not in a way that encouraged them to feel compassion for Amir and his father Baba. (Hosseini, 2003, 316) the author noted that this was an ironic consequence that many exiles from nations hostile to the United States experienced, not just Afghanis.

Unlike his father Baba, Amir, because he remained haunted by his cowardly actions and the disloyalty of his childhood, bore the slings of fortunes and insults of the American land of his refuge and torment far better than his father. Amir saw these difficulties as deserved punishments for his past crimes, rather than undeserved suffering. Amir could not escape the negative parts of his past in his own mind, even in America. "Swimming classes. Soccer.... And the Taliban scurried like rats into the caves." (Hosseini, 2003, 316) as he said at the beginning of the novel, and at its end "I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975," not because of the takeover of the Taliban. (Hosseini, 2004, 3) Life rather than politics punished him, in Amir's view. In contrast, his father also cannot forget the past -- but only what was good, rather than bad about the past. Baba saw his suffering as part of his nations, not a personal affliction.

Thus both men remained essentially frozen in time, hence the circular fashion of the narrative. Amir could not escape his guilt for his childhood wrongdoings.
Baba could accept the loss of his wealth, status, and family name. The fluidity and transience of such personal attributes as money, religion, and social approbation come into sharp relief in the contrast between the lands of America and Afghanistan -- but not because America is so democratic, but because America is so judgmental of Muslims and of Afghanis in particular, just as Afghanis were so judgmental of one another based upon religion and caste.

At the end of the novel, Amir was forgiven, but not in a way that completely satisfied his guilt, or made the crimes he had committed as a child or the crimes of his homeland really atoned for: "I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night." (Hosseini, 2003, 313) the theme of the permeability of race, class, and specific types of prejudice, and the locality of these constructions in a particular environment is thus confirmed in Amir and Baba's different status in two different lands -- yet the ubiquity of these absurd cultural institutions is also confirmed in a cross-national framework, as constructs of hatred exist in both America and Afghanistan in different but parallel fashions. The one remedy to prejudice in either land is forgiveness, suggests the book's narrative, as only forgiveness of past transgressions frees the individual to any degree of his or her past, and thus relaxes some of the pressures of prejudice, upon both those who have inflicted.....

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