A Conscientious Coward

The protagonist of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is Amir. Although the author does not describe Amir’s appearance physically, I would assume that when he was young he would have the characteristic naïve glint in his eyes like every other boy his age. The book mentions that he is not a fighter. His father laments that “‘…he never fights back. Never’” (24). Therefore, Amir can also be characterized as skinny, not of the muscular build. He would also have generic Afghan physical qualities such as tanned skin, black hair, and brown eyes.

The best word to describe Amir’s character is cowardly, at least in the first half of the book. He is dependent on his father to solve all his problems. For example, during the encounter with Assef, a bully, he kept “[wishing he’d] look up and see [his father] coming up the hill” (43). This shows his dependence on his father and his inability to rely on himself to solve his own problems. Another example of Amir’s cowardice is when his friend and servant Hassan was being raped by Assef. Amir watched in fear, and in the end, when he was deciding whether to help Hassan or not, “[he] ran because [he] was a coward. [He] was afraid of Assef and what he would do to [him]” (82). The reason Amir ran was because he was afraid. However, he did not even tell his father what happened to Hassan because he was afraid his father would chastise him for his cowardice. This reveals Amir’s selfish nature. He was more concerned with gaining his father’s praise than for the virtue of his one faithful friend. However, one redeeming quality Amir has is his conscience. After the incident with Hassan, he feels guilty about what he has done. This is what puts his apart from antagonists like Assef. He knows that he has done evil and he feels guilty. As a result, he tries unsuccessfully to amend his relationship with Hassan by provoking Hassan to attack him back. This is can be seen when he says to Hassan, “‘I want to you to stop harassing me. I want you to go away’” (94). The real reason Amir says this is revealed in these next lines: “I wished he would give it right back to me, break the door open and tell me off—it would have made things easier, better” (94). He wanted Hassan to somehow make things even between them, avenge himself for Amir’s abandonment of him during Assef’s assault.

Amir’s motivation in the first half of the book comes from his desire to please his father. Everything he does is done with the goal of reaching his father’s high standards. An example of this is when he wins the kite fighting contest, it is “…the single greatest moment of [his] twelve years of life, seeing [his father] on the roof, proud of [him] at last” (71).

The story takes place during the dying days of Afghanistan’s monarchy, with the first part mainly set in Kabul; the second setting, after the takeover of the Taliban, is mostly in California, where Amir and his father flee. Amir is a Pashtun, a “pure” Afghan, while his servant, and friend, Hassan, is a Hazara, is a mixture of Afghan and Asian descent. This causes Amir to be ridiculed and teased in the face of other Pashtuns, particularly, the antagonist, Assef, for being friends with a “‘…dirty…Hazara’” (45). Therefore the main conflict of the novel is man vs. society, where Amir struggles to maintain his friendship with Hassan against a community who sees his friend as inferior. This ethnic divide is what eventually breaks apart their friendship. Their relationship is severely damaged after Assef rapes Hassan with the desire to “‘[teach] a lesson to a disrespectful donkey’” (80). After this incident, Amir and Hassan’s friendship begins to deteriorate due to Amir’s conscientious feelings of guilt because he is unable to even look Hassan straight in the eye anymore.

Amir’s character is deeply flawed, which makes him easy to connect to. If I put myself in his shoes, I think I would have done the same as him, and fled. Being a hero at such a young age is not an easy feat, and the novel would have seemed too unreal if he had saved Hassan. However, his conscientious guilt is what makes him human and easy to relate to. He reminds me of Amelia from Jodi Picoult’s Handle With Care. Amelia’s sister has an incurable disease that makes her need more attention than normal from her parents and caretakers. When a wrongful birth lawsuit is filed against her mother’s obstetrician/gynaecologist, Amelia develops bulimia and commits self-mutilation to escape from her problems because she does not believe that her sister’s birth was wrongful but she is expected to help testify for wrongful birth. To be able to vent her pain, she starts cutting instead of facing her parents and telling them how she really feels. Similarly, Amir is pressured by his father and does not face his problems. To an outsider, Amir may seem selfish and cowardly, but inside, he is brave enough to admit that he is a coward, and later in The Kite Runner he gathers the courage to mend the divide he created between himself and Hassan.