Hey everyone. Just wondering if anyone would be willing to give their 2c on my draft and any areas which need improving? Thanks in advance.
Assef's 'eyes betrayed him. When I looked into them, the façade faltered, revealed a glimpse of the madness hiding behind them'.
'Assef is not mad; he is pure evil.'
Do you agree?
Khaled Hosseini’s fictional memoir, ‘The Kite Runner', follows the bildungsroman tale of Amir across his tumultuous and disturbed childhood to his path of redemption from his "past of unatoned sins" during his adult years. A pivotal character in the progress of events in ‘The Kite Runner' is Assef, the "childhood bully" of the Wazir Akhbar Kahn district. Assef is present from the beginning of the novel through to close to its conclusion and over the entire duration he clearly demonstrates that it is pure evil which is the driving force behind his will and not mere madness. The racially motivated rape of Hassan following the kite tournament is one of the initial indicators of Assef’s evil side and this carries right through into his adult life with Sohrab and countless other unnamed children. With the Taliban occupation of Afghanistan, Assef also comes into his element with the unmitigated freedom for the slaughter of untold numbers of innocent men, women and children. Hosseini also draws a clear connection between Assed and the evil tyrannical dictator Hitler. Assef’s boyhood obsession with the former German Furher can be seen clearly as a mimicking effect between Assef and Hitler, with both having followed similar paths whilst in positions of power.
The focal point of the novel is the rape of Hassan by Assef, which sets in motion the defining events of the story. For both Hassan and Sohrab's rape, Assef shows no signs of remorse or guilt and is clearly purely evil as a result of this. A man such as this; "a man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer", is the physical embodiment of the commonly held perception of evil. The basis upon which Assef attempts justification of his actions is one of no validity and deeply ingrained racial hatred. He sees that fact that Hassan, and even Sohrab, are "flat-nosed load carrying donkey(s)" Hazaras as an exemption from any ramifications to his actions. In his adulthood and time in power with the Taliban, his paedophilia destroys the lives of countless untold numbers of children, whose childhoods have been decimated enough already. The sheer glee and enjoyment which he takes from watching Sohrab perform with the "bells strapped to his ankles" and "his hands clapping rhythmically with the music" is also a marker for Assef's warped and comprehensively evil manner. From the early years of his childhood to his time in power as an adult, Assef is clearly evil and not just mad.
"We jus left them out for the dogs, you know.". In the grim retail of his past killings to Amir, Assef takes a morbid pleasure in that he is "doing God's work". Being a Taliban official, Assef is given free reign to carry out his every sociopathic whim without the slightest fear of prosecution by the law. The shear glee in which he takes recounting the "Hazara massacre in Mazar", in which he simply walked from "door-to-door... letting bullets fly, without any fear or remorse" is clearly indicative of Assef's insanity and pure evilness.
Hosseini uses arguably one of the darkest eras of history to highlight the true extent of Assef's evil side. By directly paralleling Assef to Hitler and the idol-worship which Assef has of his as a boy, the link between the two is made painstakingly obvious. Assef follows a similar rise to power of that of the Nazi dictator, including an unsupressed irrevocable racial bigotry and genocide of a particular group. Hosseini also goes to the trouble of giving a physical description of Assef; "the blond, blue-eyed Assef towered over the other kids", which is the same description as Hitler's ideological Aryan race from the Final Solution. Both Hitler and Assef also abused the power with which they were appointed. It needs not be stated that Hitler was a man of pure of evil and, hence, as Assef is portrayed as a likeness of Hitler, he is also pure evil.
From the description of Amir and Assef's first meeting in the 'The Kite Runner', Assef's true archetype is made known. The most apt word for which Amir can describe Assef is a word "for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath". Right through out Assef's life a distinct trail of the remnants of his evil can be seen with the long lasting and devastating effect on his victims well known. Littered over the course of his destruction lies no hint of remorse or guilt which is clearly evident that he is a man of pure evil.
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