Blog Three: A Friendship Worth Dying For

Becoming a twenty first century citizen, in my eyes, is synchronous with understanding the world from a global perspective as our version of reality is highly biased until we see the world through a fresh pair of eyes. Even though I had read many news reports about the Taliban in Afghanistan, my comprehension of their immortality was incomplete until I obtained a first person perspective of the atrocities they committed in the form of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. No other book has haunted me so deeply as a reminder of how privileged I am to live in a country where murder and vicious assault are not affecting the general population. We may consider these acts to be relics of another era , but in other parts of the world a suspicious glance could be a death wish. The stream of consciousness from the central narrator, Amir delivers a brutally realistic portrayal of the fall of Afghan's monarchy leading to the invasion of Soviet military forces and subsequent exodus of refugees to Pakistan or the United States. However, these events that initiated the rise of the Taliban regime act as a foil to the humanity of Amir and Hassan who, despite their separate social classes, form an inseparable bond over childhood kite flying days. Amir acts the kite runner, retrieving the fallen kites of other flyers until Amir flies the kite longer than all the kids who have left the safety of their neighborhoods to compete with one another. The bildungsroman aspect of this novel stems from Amir's failure to save Hassan from an act of violence when he was little due to his cowardice. For the rest of his life, Amir seeks to redeem himself and purge his corruptible nature. The striking antithesis of violence in parallel to undeterrable friendship offered a previously unobtainable view of not only the history of the Taliban, but the insuppressible power of human connection that will withstand even the most harrowing circumstances. I was stunned by the vehemence Hosseini crafted with a mere sprinkling of words: "A boy who can't stand up for himself becomes a man who stand up to anything." But the most significant reason why I believe all high schoolers should read this book is that it is from an entirely unique, and alien perspective of a boy who grew up halfway around the world where he endured more hardships than I ever will.
A link to discussion questions and more information:
http://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/13-fiction/510-kite-runner-hosseini?start=1

A Favorite Quote (or two):
"There is only one sin, and that is theft...when you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth."
“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.” 
“There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.”