Monday, May 5, 2008
Kite Runner Ch 14-19
Post your follow-up comments about the Monday, May 5 discussion of The Kite Runner here. If you were assigned the observer task of blogging, write a brief summary of the discussion's main ideas. If you are blogging voluntarily, try to add comments that extend the discussion; do not just repeat was was already said.
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When I first started reading this book I wondered why the material in the first section of the book had so many seemingly random and useless details. But as I read the fourth section, chapters 14-19, it became clear that all of the little events written about were really important to the story. For example, when Amir and Hassan were infants, they had the same woman who nursed them. Baba mentioned several times that "there was a brotherhood between people who fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break."
In this section of the book we find out that Baba was actually Hassan's father, and Amir and Hassan were half-brothers.
That is just one example of things that meant something earlier on; the reader just didn't know what or why.
Rahim Khan, Baba's old business partner, and Amir's friend and mentor became ill, and Amir went to see him in Pakistan. Rahim fills Amir in on the details of his illness, and of Hassan and his wife and child moving back into Baba's house, and that Hassan and his wife had been killed. After they caught up on all of the history, including the family secrets, Rahim Khan reveals his true intentions for asking Amir to return to Pakistan; that is to go back to Afghanistan to retrieve Hassan's son, Amir's nephew, and bring him back to Pakistan to a safe home.
On Amir's travel into Afghanistan, his driver was surly and rude to him because he thought that Amir didn't know or care about what was really gong on in Afghanistan, and that he was just there to sell old property and take his money back to America. However, once he learned the real purpose of Amir's journey, the driver felt guilty that he had misjudged him. I suspect that this change in attitude of the driver is important, and may be a foreshadowing that Amir will receive other help for his worthy cause, and shows that others may believe he is doing something good. So, maybe Amir will get the opportunity to make atonement for his sins of the past, after all.
On the trip, Amir is housed by the poor family of his driver. Amir realizes that they all went without food in order to feed him and the driver. Perhaps in partial atonement for the past wrong he did to Hassan, he repeated the action of planting a "fistful of crumpled money under a mattress." However, this time, it was done for good.
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