A* Full-Mark Essay response to the question, ‘The Kite Runner is a novel designed to promote the strength of the pen as a tool for protest.’ To what extent do you agree?'
Thorough use of quotations, context, authorial methods and analysis.
‘The Kite Runner is a novel designed to promote the strength of the pen as a tool for protest.’
To what extent do you agree?
25 Marks
Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is a novel specifically designed to protest the social and political issues of
Afghanistan, its intention is to highlight the plight of the people under the treatment of the Taliban as well
as expose already existing issues within Afghan culture; both ethnic and gender-based injustices. With the
novel’s narrator and protagonist being a writer, immediately the reader is met with the concept of writing
as an empowering form of protest – in both the fictional world of the novel and the reality it reflects.
Hosseini humanizes a time of charged political unrest, mirroring the smaller relationships of Amir and
Hassan with the larger scale behind them. Amir dictates stories for Hassan, an ethnic minority,
deciphering his understanding of truth as an abuse of his power; this power then translates into Amir
being ‘not that kind of a writer’ who exposes social struggles, to then eventually coming to redeem
himself in finally writing this novel that speaks out against injustices he was complicit in. Amir’s abuse of
the pen in falsifying stories to Hassan was microcosmic for the large-scale oppression of the Hazaras in
Afghanistan in the late 20th Century. Hosseini also demonstrates the issue of the pen in its feminized
perception, having Amir defy male stereotype in pursuing his career as a writer. There are other issues
that perhaps Hosseini assigns to the importance of writing – this being its hand in the formation of
relationships, Amir and his mother, or Amir and Rahim Kahn and its distancing of a relationship with his
father. Perhaps, the novel’s main purpose for its fictional narrator is to portray his story of redemption,
and the significance of the pen in allowing him to voice this.
The beginning of the novel sees to an often-overt demonstration of the power dynamic between Amir and
Hassan, that is a reflection of the superiority of the Pashtuns over the Hazaras in Afghanistan; writing and
storytelling is abused by Amir as a means of exerting his power over Hassan. In a ploy to play just
‘another little trick’ on Hassan, Amir recalls that he ‘suddenly strayed from the written story,’ though this
act may seem minor, it presents an awareness in Amir of his power – and with that awareness, he then
decides to abuse that power. Hosseini’s use of the belittling adjective, ‘little,’ suggest that Amir is aware
of the deceptiveness of his actions, and therefore decides to dismiss their weight; this is perhaps Hosseini
trying to reflect the larger scale dismissiveness of the Pashtuns when it came to their treatment of the
Hazaras and their subsequent plight. The importance of the ‘written story’ is presented here as some form
of the truth, Baba argues that the only crime is ‘theft’ and that lying was ‘thieving a man of his right to the
truth,’ which here, Amir acts out. By ‘straying,’ an adjective also undermining of the severity of his
actions, from the ‘written story’ Amir deprives Hassan of his access to some version of ‘the truth,’ and in
this, Amir’s power is elevated whilst Hassan is at a loss. Hosseini later describes Hassan as someone
‘drawn to the mystery of words,’ which suggests that solely by his position as a Hazara – language is
inaccessible to him, and it is Amir who maintains that – with the ability to teach him, Amir instead
decides to distance Hassan even further from it. Amir even casually asks, ‘what use did a servant have for
the written word?’ his rhetorical question conveys that his own behaviour was the product of a wider,
racist control of language by the Afghan Pashtuns. Amir’s abuse of Hassan through dictating his own
version of a story is a microcosm for the perpetuated norms of class divided Afghanistan, dominated by
Pashtuns, that disallowed the ethnic minority access to language and literature. The novel in itself
demonstrates why this act is one so oppressive, without the means to writing, Hassan remains in
‘mystery,’ and as do the people he represents – unable to write, they are unable to voice their plight.
Hosseini protests that writing is a form of empowering the disempowered and bystanders, such as Amir
who could defy the Afghan norms, allow this to continue.
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