Does living in the United States of America change Amir’s understanding of his childhood in Afghanistan?
The Kite Runner follows the journey of a man who is on an epic quest in search of true redemption. Amir is in search of his own identity throughout the text and is often consumed with the necessity to win the approval of his father, Baba. Although Amir shows acts of cowardice and disloyalty in his childhood, it is his ability to learn forgiveness and his motivation to save Sohrab at the end of the text which proves that, despite Baba’s ideal, Amir does become a man who stands up for something, and change his understanding of his childhood giving him purpose and redemption. Amir’s dreams of Hassan throughout his childhood renders him incompetent to move on with his life and make him feel remorse and precarious.
In America, Amir falls in love with Soraya and marries her. He was bothered that she had been with another man, but concludes that 'how could [he], of all people, chastise someone for their past' given his own wrongdoings. He admits that she was a 'better person' than he was due to her courage to stand tall after having her secret out. Amir’s betrayals of Hassan do not go unpunished. Amir is tormented by the guild he feels at having failed to speak up during Assef’s rape of Hassan:’ There was a monster in the lake’ of Hassan’s dream. ‘it had grabbed Hassan by the ankles, dragged him to the murky bottom. I was that monster’. Later, when his actions cause Hassan and Ali to leave, Amir acknowledges that he’ understood the depth of the pain’ he had caused, ‘the blackness of grief I had bought everyone’. Amir battles with his conscience constantly as he grows older, using his new life in America to bury his ‘memories’ when he can no longer deal with them. At the mere mention of Hassan’s name, Amir can feel that ‘a pair of steel hands closed around my windpipe’.
Amir is able to elope from his memories and is relieved to be ‘some place with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins” hence he “embraced America.” This may also apply to Baba, though it is not directly stated. They both have sins to bury amongst their memories. Baba’s sin is stealing Hassan’s right to a father, which is unveiled later in the book that he was Hassan’s biological father. For Amir, America was a place to bury his memories. For Baba, it was a place to mourn his. Living in America gave Amir time to contemplate about his childhood, he changes his perspective on life, takes responsibility for his own actions and wants to redeem himself of what happened when he was a child. It allowed Amir to grow up into a person who could confront his past. One could say Baba’s death freed Amir, he longer had to necessity to seek approval of his father, which allowed him to act more freely and move on from his childhood memories.
Rahim Khan calls Amir from Pakistan ‘ there was a way to be good again’, summoning him back to redeem his past, reluctant to go back. Yet the fact that Rahim Khan is dying draws him into 'giving in'. At the point in the novel, Amir is still terrified of his own betrayal of Hassan. He has trouble deciding whether to take the easy way out again and ignore the problem or finally confront it. He decides to fly to Pakistan in an attempt to redeem himself for his past actions. Adopting Sohrab back to America is also Amir’s first altruistic act which gives him purpose and redemption that he has been searching for. By this stage, Amir has finally learnt to stand up for something, despite Baba saying “A boy won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who won’t stand up for anything” when he was a child. When Amir and Sohrab fight the blue kite, the story finally comes full circle. Kite fighting takes Amir back to the moment before everything changed, before Hassan had been raped and they were just two boys kite fighting. He says, "I was twelve again." Now that Amir has forgiven himself, kite fighting reminds him of pleasure instead of pain.
In conclusion, the move to America allowed Amir to elope from his childhood in Afghanistan. He did not want to 'understand' or linger on the past. He wanted to suppress it with his new life in America. It was only when Rahim Khan rang him and said ‘there was a way to be good again’ that he began to recollect and feel more affected by the actions he made in his childhood. Hosseini finishes the novel with a brilliant pun, ‘I ran’, Even though Amir's story has made a circle metaphorically speaking, it has not ended where it began. Amir is running in a positive way, away from Sohrab physically but toward him emotionally. He is able run with freedom in his heart instead of fear as opposed to the beginning where he feels remorse and precarious. Amir is no longer a captive held back by his childhood memories.
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