My First Impressions of The Kite Runner

The historical fiction novel, The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini portrays a young Amir, who struggles through complicated friendship with his servant’s son, Hassan.  Their relationship starts off like normal one; they play and make mischief together all the time, but, strangely, Hassan always takes the blame for all the troubles they cause together.  It seems like Hassan knows his place as Amir’s servant, but doesn’t let it come in their friendship’s way.  On the other hand, as Amir grows older, he begins to realize the differences between him and his best friend.  They come from two different races, they come from different ends of the social ladder, and have different traits (Hassan is athletic and Amir is educated).  He begins to isolate himself from Hassan, using this as an excuse, but the real reason is that he feels guilt. 

After Amir witnesses Hassan’s rape and doesn’t do anything to protect him, he feels regret.  He therefore separates himself from Hassan in order to separate himself from the constant reminder of what he didn’t do.  He then follows this up with asking Hassan to come up the hill for him to read a story to him.  It seems as though things were going well between hem, like old days, but then all of the sudden, the guild took over Amir, and he pelted Hassan with pomegranates, waiting for him to hit him back.  He wanted to feel as though Hassan had taken revenge on him, in order to take away some of the guilt.  After Hassan proves himself unable to inflict any physical harm to him, Amir feels as though it is hopeless to get Hassan to take revenge on him, and he won’t let go, so he thinks that he will get rid of his problems if he got rid of Hassan.  Amir frames Hassan of stealing his birthday money and watch.  All of Amir’s actions are an attempt to rid his extreme regret and guilt for not helping a friend in need.  Instead of admitting it, or letting go, he tries all of these things that result in a lost friend that could have been kept.  

Overall, I really, really enjoyed reading this book.  There were many surprises throughout the first third of the book, and it turned out much more interesting than I first thought it would be.