Relationship and meaning in context

Relationship and Meaning in the Kite Runner

America acts as a place for Amir to bury his memories and a place for Baba to mourn his. In America, there are "homes that made Baba's house in Wazir Akbar Khan look like a servant's hut." What is ironic about this statement? What is the function of irony in this novel?

The Kite Runner is a novel of irony, the irony about a particular kind of immigrant experience in America, the experience of Afghani Muslim-Americans. On one hand, immigrants usually come to America to better their economic lot. Traditionally, the images of America are those of streets paved with gold, boulevards crammed to the brim with opportunities for new immigrants. However, the only reason the Afghani natives of Khaled Hosseini's novel flee to the United States is to escape the new regime in their country, the theocratic, anti-Western, and anti-capitalist Taliban leadership. Before this institution of a theocracy in Afghanistan, the narrator's family was extremely well off in comparison to their neighbors. The family's immigration to the United States meant a terrible reduction in their economic and social status. Before, Amir and his father Baba were the wealthy men of the town, in a poor land -- now it is they who are poor, but in a rich land.

However, the choice of phrase, "like a servant's house," also betrays Amir's continually guilty conscious about the death of his friend Hassan. Hassan was Amir's 'kite runner' when he was twelve. Then, Amir participated in a freewheeling kite competition, a lawless Afghani competition of no rules, much like the land of the United States. But kite flying is also a competition of circular movement much like the novel and much of Afghani traditional life. During one of these competitions, Hassan was killed and Amir fled.

Ironically, the reduction in the narrator's status from life as a boy to his initial life in the United States -- to the status of a servant, the quote implies -- has freed Amir from the haunting location of the first, framing scene of the novel, where "the past claws its way out," in defiance of his attempts to forget it. Temporarily, America provides a place for Amir to forget his past. (1)

However, the images of kites haunt the narrator as they flit in the sky as he sits on a bench at the beginning of the novel, after he has been shaken by a phone call from a voice from his past. Amir can never quite forget his past, any more than he can forget his identity in America. Amir and his father are always seen as different from his fellow dwellers in America because of his religion, much as Amir perceives himself as different because of his guilty past.

While he and his father strove to escape theocratic control of their lives in Afghanistan, ironically the dwellers of America, who are not Muslim, often see Amir and Baba solely in terms of the Muslim's faith, nationality, and color, even while the Taliban persecuted both the father and son for not being Muslim 'enough.' Just as Hassan was marked with a cleft lip at childhood, so Amir is now marked by his face and identity in a way that is unfair, and suffers -- suffers for a crime Amir did not commit, even while he was not punished for a crime against Hassan that he did commit.

The novel's narrative structure circularity also gives it an additional level pf irony, as Amir and Baba came to the United States for escape, yet they are pursued by their past nationality, religion, and in Amir's case, by a past of memories. Baba often seeks to immerse himself in memories of a past long gone, despite the potential for a new life in America. But Amir, even with his intense desire to cast off the memories of the old world of Afghanistan and his cruelties as a child cannot fully embrace the new life of an immigrant experience. He finds himself locked in a kind of a loop of motion and memory, like the flight of a kite, just as the novel itself makes use of a cycle of presenting images of the kite, the murder, and the ignoring of Hassan -- and the lawlessness and absence of rules of kite flying and kite running practiced by the servant Hassan.